Related papers: Bacterial hydrodynamics
The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth in understanding of the pivotal roles of mechanical stresses and physical forces in cell biology. As a result an integrated view of cell biology is evolving, where genetic and molecular features…
Suspensions of motile cells are model systems for understanding the unique mechanical properties of living materials which often consist of ensembles of self-propelled particles. We present here a quantitative comparison of theory against…
The motion of microorganisms in their natural habitat is strongly influenced by their propulsion mechanisms, geometrical constraints, and random fluctuations. Here, we study numerically the first-passage-time (FPT) statistics of…
Motile eukaryotic cells propel themselves in viscous fluids by passing waves of bending deformation down their flagella. An infinitely long flagellum achieves a hydrodynamically optimal low-Reynolds number locomotion when the angle between…
Living creatures exhibit a remarkable diversity of locomotion mechanisms, evolving structures specialised for interacting with their environment. In the vast majority of cases, locomotor behaviours such as flying, crawling, and running, are…
Bioconvection, a phenomenon arising from the collective motion of motile microorganisms, plays a crucial role in shaping microbial distributions, fluid dynamics, and bloom formation in aquatic environments. While extensive research has…
The bacterium {\em Bacilus subtilis} frequently forms biofilms at the interface between the culture medium and the air. We develop a mathematical model that couples a description of bacteria as individual discrete objects to the standard…
Bacteria suspension exhibits a wide range of collective phenomena arising from interactions between individual cells. Here we show Serratia marcescens cells near an air-liquid interface spontaneously aggregate into dynamic clusters through…
Traditional locomotion strategies become ineffective at low Reynolds numbers, where viscous forces predominate over inertial forces. To adapt, microorganisms have evolved specialized structures like cilia and flagella for efficient…
Thiovulum majus, which is one of the fastest known bacteria, swims using hundreds of flagella. Unlike typical pusher cells, which swim in circular paths over hard surfaces, a T. majus cell turns its flagella normal to the surface. To probe…
To initiate tumbling of an E. coli, one of the helical flagella reverses its sense of rotation. It then transforms from its normal form first to the transient semicoiled state and subsequently to the curly-I state. The dynamics of…
In bacterial chemotaxis, E. coli cells drift up chemical gradients by a series of runs and tumbles. Runs are periods of directed swimming, and tumbles are abrupt changes in swimming direction. Near the beginning of each run, the rotating…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Bacterial cellulose biofilms are complex networks of strong interwoven nanofibers that control transport and protect bacterial colonies in the film. Design of diverse applications of bacterial cellulose films also relies on understanding…
Many biological microorganisms and artificial microswimmers react to external cues of environmental gradients by changing their swimming directions. We study here the behavior of eukarytic flagellated microswimmers in linear viscosity…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
We characterize the bundle properties for three different strains of \textit{B. subtilis} bacteria with various numbers of flagella. Our study reveals that, surprisingly, the number of bundles is independent of the number of flagella, and…
Despite their vast morphological diversity, many invertebrates have similar larval forms characterized by ciliary bands, innervated arrays of beating cilia that facilitate swimming and feeding. Hydrodynamics suggests that these bands should…
Interaction of swimming bacteria with flows controls their ability to explore complex environments, crucial to many societal and environmental challenges and relevant for microfluidic applications as cell sorting. Combining experimental,…
Trajectories and conformations of uni- and multiflagellar bacteria are studied with a coarse-grained model of a cell comprised of elastic flagella connected to a cell body. The elasticities of both the hook protein (connecting cell body and…