Related papers: Flagella bending affects macroscopic properties of…

Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…

The swimming motility of bacteria is driven by the action of bacterial flagellar motors, whose outermost structure is a long and thin helicoidal filament. When rotated, the fluid medium exerts an anisotropic viscous drag on the flagellar…

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…

E. coli bacteria swim following a run and tumble pattern. In the run state all flagella join in a single helical bundle that propels the cell body along approximately straight paths. When one or more flagellar motors reverse direction the…

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…

Confining surfaces play crucial roles in dynamics, transport and order in many physical systems, but their effects on active matter, a broad class of dynamically self-organizing systems, are poorly understood. We investigate here the…

Bacterial flagella assume different helical shapes during the tumbling phase of a bacterium but also in response to varying environmental conditions. Force-extension measurements by Darnton and Berg explicitly demonstrate a transformation…

Peritrichous bacteria such as Escherichia coli swim in viscous fluids by forming a helical bundle of flagellar filaments. The filaments are spatially distributed around the cell body to which they are connected via a flexible hook. To…

To swim through a viscous fluid, a flagellated bacterium must overcome the fluid drag on its body by rotating a flagellum or a bundle of multiple flagella. Because the drag increases with the size of bacteria, it is expected theoretically…

Bacterial swimming is well characterized in uniform liquids at rest. The natural habitat of bacterial swimmers, however, is often dominated by moving fluids and interfaces, resulting in shear flows that may strongly alter bacterial…

We study a synthetic system of motile Escherichia coli bacteria encapsulated inside giant lipid vesicles. Forces exerted by the bacteria on the inner side of the membrane are sufficient to extrude membrane tubes filled with one or several…

The natural habitats of microorganisms in the human microbiome and ocean and soil ecosystems are full of colloids and macromolecules, which impart non-Newtonian flow properties drastically affecting the locomotion of swimming…

{\it E. coli} bacteria swim in straight runs interrupted by sudden reorientation events called tumbles. The resulting random walks give rise to density fluctuations that can be derived analytically in the limit of non interacting particles…

We report experiments on the deformation and transport of an elastic fiber in a viscous cellular flow, namely a lattice of counter-rotative vortices. We show that the fiber can buckle when approaching a stagnation point. By tuning either…

We investigate dense suspensions of swimming bacteria prepared in a nutrient-exchange chamber. Near the pellet concentration, nonthermal fluctuations showed notable agreement between self and collective behaviors, a phenomenon not…

We describe a new kind of self-propelling motion of bacteria based on the cooperative action of rotating flagella on the surface of bacteria. Describing the ensemble of rotating flagella in the framework of the hydrodynamics with spin the…

In a fluid environment, flagellated microswimmers propel themselves by rotating their flagella. The morphology of these flagella significantly influences forward speed, swimming efficiency, and directional stability, which are critical for…

Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…

Peritrichous bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments. As the bacterium swims forward, all its flagella rotate in synchrony behind the cell in a helical bundle. When the bacterium changes its…

We study the transport of bacteria in a porous media modeled by a square channel containing one cylindrical obstacle via molecular dynamics simulations coupled to a lattice Boltzmann fluid. Our bacteria model is a rod-shaped rigid body…