Related papers: High-Resolution Structure and Intermolecular Inter…
Microbial flagellates typically inhabit complex suspensions of polymeric material which can impact the swimming speed of motile microbes, filter-feeding of sessile cells, and the generation of biofilms. There is currently a need to better…
A large filament composed principally of two sections erupted sequentially in the southern hemisphere on January 26 2016. The central, thick part of the northern section was first lifted up and lead to the eruption of the full filament.…
Twisted and rope-like assemblies of filamentous molecules are common and vital structural elements in cells and tissue of living organisms. We study the intrinsic frustration occurring in these materials between the two-dimensional…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
Eukaryotic flagella are active structures with a complex architecture of microtubules, motor proteins and elastic links. They are capable of whiplike motions driven by motors sliding along filaments that are themselves constrained at an…
Highly oriented solid-supported lipid membranes in stacks of controlled number $N \simeq 16$ (oligo-membranes) have been prepared by spin-coating using the uncharged lipid model system 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DMPC). The…
Cilia and flagella are highly conserved slender organelles that exhibit a variety of rhythmic beating patterns from non-planar cone-like motions to planar wave-like deformations. Although their internal structure, composed of a…
The assembly of nanometer-sized building blocks into complex morphologies is not only of fundamental interest but also plays a key role in material science and nanotechnology. We show that the shape of self-assembled superstructures formed…
Cilia and flagella are hairlike organelles that propel cells through fluid. The active motion of the axoneme, the motile structure inside cilia and flagella, is powered by molecular motors of the dynein family. These motors generate forces…
Many bacterial species are helical in form, including the widespread pathogen H. pylori. Motivated by recent experiments on H. pylori showing that cell wall synthesis is not uniform, we investigate the possible formation of helical cell…
The deformations of flagella are important in the motility of single- and multi-flagellated bacteria. Existing numerical methods have treated flagella as extensible filaments with a large extensional modulus, resulting in a stiff numerical…
Any macroscopic deformation of a filamentous bundle is necessarily accompanied by local sliding and/or stretching of the constituent filaments. Yet the nature of the sliding friction between two aligned filaments interacting through…
The flexibility of the bacterial flagellar hook is believed to have substantial consequences for microorganism locomotion. Using a simplified model of a rigid flagellum and a flexible hook, we show that the paths of axisymmetric cell bodies…
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…
We establish the Statistical Mechanics framework for a bundle of Nf living and uncrosslinked actin filaments in a supercritical solution of free monomers pressing against a mobile wall. The filaments are anchored normally to a fixed planar…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
Bundles of filamentous polymers are primary structural components of a broad range of cytoskeletal structures, and their mechanical properties play key roles in cellular functions ranging from locomotion to mechanotransduction and…
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…
Motivated by bacterial transport through porous media, here we study the swimming of an actuated, flexible helical filament in both three-dimensional free space and within a cylindrical tube whose diameter is much smaller than the length of…
The hydrodynamic interactions among bacterial cell bodies, flagella, and surrounding boundaries are essential for understanding bacterial motility in complex environments. In this study, we demonstrate that each slender flagellum can be…