Related papers: Physical Limits on Bacterial Navigation in Dynamic…
The run-and-tumble dynamics of bacteria, as exhibited by \textit{E. coli}, offers a simple experimental realization of non-Brownian, yet diffusive, particles. Here we present some analytic and numerical results for models of the ideal…
The dynamics of swimming bacteria depend on the properties of their habitat media. Recently it was shown that the motion of swimming bacteria dispersed directly in a non-toxic water-based lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal can be controlled…
Bacteria commonly inhabit porous environments such as host tissues, soil, and marine sediments, where complex geometries constrain and redirect their motion. Although bacterial motility has been studied in porous media, the roles of cell…
Bacteria seem masters of chemotaxis, yet recent work suggests otherwise. Henry Mattingly and colleagues (Nature Physics, 2026) argue that Escherichia coli uses only a small fraction of the sensory information available at its surface,…
Many bacteria live in natural and clinical environments with abundant macromolecular polymers. Macromolecular fluids commonly display viscoelasticity and non-Newtonian rheological behavior; it is unclear how these complex-fluid properties…
We formulate the Smoluchowski equation for a run-and-tumble particle. It includes the mean tumble rate in a chemical field, for which we derive a Markovian response theory. Using a multipole expansion and a reaction-diffusion equation for…
Bacteria commonly live in structured communities that affect human health and influence ecological systems. Heterogeneous populations, such as motile and non-motile populations, often coexist in bacteria communities. Motile subpopulations…
Biological pattern formation is one of the most intriguing phenomena in nature. Simplest examples of such patterns are represented by travelling waves and stationary periodic patterns which occur during various biological processes…
The field of active matter explores the behaviors of self propelled agents out of equilibrium, with active suspensions, such as swimming bacteria in solutions, serving as impactful models. These systems exhibit spatio-temporal patterns akin…
Dense suspensions of swimming bacteria are known to exhibit collective behaviour arising from the interplay of steric and hydrodynamic interactions. Unconfined suspensions exhibit transient, recurring vortices and jets, whereas those…
Conjugation accelerates bacterial evolution by enabling bacteria to acquire genes horizontally from their neighbors. Plasmid donors must physically encounter and connect with recipients to allow plasmid transfer, and different environments…
Aerotaxis is the ability of motile cells to navigate toward oxygen. A key question is the dependence of the aerotactic velocity with the local oxygen concentration c. Here we combine simultaneous bacteria tracking and local oxygen…
In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
For navigation, microscopic agents such as biological cells rely on noisy sensory input. In cells performing chemotaxis, such noise arises from the stochastic binding of signaling molecules at low concentrations. Using chemotaxis of sperm…
Complex or hostile environments can sometimes inhibit the movement capabilities of diffusive particles or active swimmers, who may thus become stuck in fixed positions. This occurs, for example, in the adhesion of bacteria to surfaces at…
Microbial interactions regulate their spread and survival in competitive environments. It is not clear if the physical parameters of the environment regulate the outcome of these interactions. In this work, we show that the opportunistic…
In this paper we present a hydrodynamic approach to describe the motion of migrating bacteria as a special class of self-propelled systems. Analytical and numerical calculations has been performed to study the behavior of our model in the…
A simple model is studied for the chemotactic movement of biological cells in the presence of a periodic chemical wave. It incorporates the feature of adaptation that may play an important role in allowing for ``rectified" chemotaxis:…
Bacteria in bulk fluids swim collectively and display fascinating emergent dynamics. Although bacterial collective swimming in three-dimensional (3D) geometries has been well studied, its counterpart in confined two-dimensional (2D)…
We numerically investigate the motion of active artificial microswimmers diffusing in a fuel concentration gradient. We observe that, in the steady state, their probability density accumulates in the low-concentration regions, whereas a…