Related papers: Collective force generation by groups of migrating…
Effective organismal behavior responds appropriately to changes in the surrounding environment. Attaining this delicate balance of sensitivity and stability is a hallmark of the animal kingdom. By studying the locomotory behavior of a…
We combine technical, experimental and theoretical efforts to investigate the collective dynamics of artificial microcilia in a viscous fluid. We take advantage of soft-lithography and colloidal self-assembly to devise microcapets made of…
Bacterial communities such as biofilms are widely recognised as being important for survival and persistence of bacteria in harsh environments. Mechanistic models of biofilm growth indicate that the way in which the surface is seeded can…
The evolutionary success of bacteria lies in their ability to form complex surface-associated communities in diverse biophysical settings. However, it remains poorly understood how compliance of soft surfaces, measured in terms of their…
The present article is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). It is a review of the biophysical mechanisms that underly cell motility. It mainly focuses…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…
Collective cell migration contributes to embryogenesis, wound healing and tumor metastasis. Cell monolayer migration experiments help understanding what determines the movement of cells far from the leading edge. Inhibiting cell…
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…
Dense monolayers of living cells display intriguing relaxation dynamics, reminiscent of soft and glassy materials close to the jamming transition, and migrate collectively when space is available, as in wound healing or in cancer invasion.…
Bacterial cellulose biofilms are complex networks of strong interwoven nanofibers that control transport and protect bacterial colonies in the film. Design of diverse applications of bacterial cellulose films also relies on understanding…
Soft surfaces, spanning vastly different environmental and biomedical settings, are frequently colonised by surface-associated bacteria. Yet, how soft surfaces govern bacterial dynamics and their self-organisation into colonies remains…
Cells or bacteria carrying cilia on their surface show many striking features : alignment of cilia in an array, two-phase asymmetric beating for each cilium, coordination between cilia and existence of metachronal waves with a constant…
The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
We analyse a generic motility model, with the motility mechanism arising by contractile stress due to the interaction of myosin and actin. A hydrodynamic active polar gel theory is used to model the cytoplasm of a cell and is combined with…
Motile cilia are a striking example of functional cellular organelle, conserved across all the eukaryotic species. Motile cilia allow swimming of cells and small organisms and transport of liquids across epithelial tissues. Whilst the…
In biological systems, molecular-scale forces and motions are pivotal for enabling processes like motility, shape change, and replication. These forces and motions are organized, amplified, and transmitted across macroscopic scales by…
Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…