Related papers: Realizing the physics of motile cilia synchronizat…
When tiny soft ferromagnetic particles are placed along a liquid interface and exposed to a vertical magnetic field, the balance between capillary attraction and magnetic repulsion leads to self-organization into well-defined patterns.…
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
Bacteria can adjust the structure of colonies and biofilms to enhance their survival rate under external stress. Here, we explore the link between bacterial interaction forces and colony structure. We show that the activity of extracellular…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
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…
Chemical communication, response, and feedback are key requirements for the function of adaptive materials with life-like properties. However, how communication on the single cell-level impacts the collective structural, dynamical and…
Synchronization among arrays of beating cilia is one of the emergent phenomena in biological processes at meso-scopic scales. Strong inter-ciliary couplings modify the natural beating frequencies, $\omega$, of individual cilia to produce a…
Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…
Active matter spans a wide range of time and length scales, from groups of cells and synthetic self-propelled particles to schools of fish, flocks of birds, or even human crowds. The theoretical framework describing these systems has shown…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
Some microorganisms, such as spermatozoa, synchronize their flagella when swimming in close proximity. Using a simplified model (two infinite, parallel, two-dimensional waving sheets), we show that phase-locking arises from hydrodynamics…
The coupling of the internal mechanisms of cell polarization to cell shape deformations and subsequent cell crawling poses many interdisciplinary scientific challenges. Several mathematical approaches have been proposed to model the…
The course of a peritrichous bacterium such as E. coli crucially depends on the level of synchronization and self-organization of several rotating flagella. However, the rotation of each flagellum generates counter body movements which in…
Bacteria exist in a free-swimming state or in a sessile biofilm state. The transition from free-swimming to sessile mode is characterized by changes in gene expression which alter, among others,the mechanics of flagellar motility. In this…
We use a 3D computational model to study the fluid transport and mixing due to the beating of an infinite array of cilia. In accord with recent experiments, we observe two distinct regions: a fluid transport region above the cilia and a…
Cell motility is one of the most fundamental phenomena underlying biological processes that maintain living organisms alive. Here we introduce a simple model to describe the motility of cells which include not only time-correlated internal…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…
The motility of microorganisms in liquid media is an important issue in active matter and it is not yet fully understood. Previous theoretical approaches dealing with the microscopic description of microbial movement have modeled the…
We study the dynamics of self-propelled chains with the excluded volume interaction via the Brownian dynamics simulation, in which the bending elasticity of chains is varied. The changes of the bending elasticity lead to various…
Motility induced phase separation is an efficient aggregation mechanism of active matter, yet biological systems exhibit richer organization through communication among constituents. We investigate suspensions of active particles that…