Related papers: Bacterial swarmer cells in confinement: A mesoscal…
Bacterial colonies are a well-known example of living active matter, exhibiting collective behaviors such as nematic alignment and collective motion that play an important role in the spread of microbial infections. While the underlying…
Understanding mixing and transport of passive scalars in active fluids is important to many natural (e.g. algal blooms) and industrial (e.g. biofuel, vaccine production) processes. Here, we study the mixing of a passive scalar (dye) in…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
Bacteria in biofilms form complex structures and can collectively migrate within mobile aggregates, which is referred to as swarming. This behavior is influenced by a combination of various factors, including morphological characteristics…
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…
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…
Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…
Swimming micro-organisms such as bacteria or spermatozoa are typically found in dense suspensions, and exhibit collective modes of locomotion qualitatively different from that displayed by isolated cells. In the dilute limit where…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
As a paradigmatic model of active fluids, bacterial suspensions show intriguing rheological responses drastically different from their counterpart colloidal suspensions. Although the flow of bulk bacterial suspensions has been extensively…
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
Many swimming bacteria naturally inhabit confined environments, yet how confinement influences their swimming behaviors remains unclear. Here, we combine experiments, continuum modeling and particle-based simulations to investigate…
We present a simple model for bacteria like \emph{Escherichia coli} swimming near solid surfaces. It consists of two spheres of different radii connected by a dragless rod. The effect of the flagella is taken into account by imposing a…
We report molecular dynamics simulations of the segregation of two overlapping chains in cylindrical confinement. We find that the entropic repulsion between the chains can be sufficiently strong to cause segregation on a time scale that is…
We analyse the motion of a flagellated bacterium in a two-fluid medium using slender body theory. The two-fluid model is useful for describing a body moving through a complex fluid with a microstructure whose length scale is comparable to…
Numerous studies have explored the link between bacterial swimming and the number of flagella, a distinguishing feature of motile multiflagellated bacteria. We revisit this open question using augmented slender-body theory simulations, in…
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…
Unraveling bacterial strategies for spatial exploration is crucial for understanding the complexity in the organization of life. Bacterial motility determines the spatio-temporal structure of microbial communities, controls infection…
We develop a numerical framework to simulate the locomotion of a flagellated bacterium with a spheroidal head (such as Escherichia coli) in biological fluids like mucus, which are entangled polymer solutions exhibiting elasto-viscoplastic…
At sufficiently high concentrations, motile bacteria suspended in fluids exhibit a range of ordered and disordered collective motions. Here we explore the combined effects of confinement, periodicity and curvature induced by the active…