Related papers: Biopolymer dynamics driven by helical flagella
Active filament-like systems propelling along their backbone exist across the scales ranging from motor-driven bio-filaments to worms and robotic chains. In macroscopic active filaments such as chain of robots, in contrast to their…
Traditional locomotion strategies become ineffective at low Reynolds numbers, where viscous forces predominate over inertial forces. To adapt, microorganisms have evolved specialized structures like cilia and flagella for efficient…
The rotational diffusive motion of a self-propelled, attractive spherical colloid immersed in a solution of self-avoiding polymers is studied by mesoscale hydrodynamic simulations. A drastic enhancement of the rotational diffusion by more…
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…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
Simulations of over $10^3$ hydrodynamically coupled solid spheres are performed to investigate collective motion of linear trains and regular square arrays of particles suspended in a fluid bounded by two parallel walls. Our novel…
The locomotion of swimming bacteria in simple Newtonian fluids can successfully be described within the framework of low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. The presence of polymers in biofluids generally increases the viscosity, which is…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study structure formation in simple model polymer chains that are subject to excluded volume and torsional interactions. The changing conformations exhibited by chains of different lengths under…
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…
We study the dynamics of a polymer that is pulled by a constant force through a viscoelastic medium. This is a model for a polymer being pulled through a cell by an external force, or for an active biopolymer moving due to a self generated…
We study the dynamics of polymer chains in a bath of self-propelled particles (SPP) by extensive Langevin dynamics simulations in a two dimensional system. Specifically, we analyse the polymer looping properties versus the SPP activity and…
The propulsion of many eukaryotic cells is generated by flagella, flexible slender filaments that are actively oscillating in space and time. The dynamics of these biological appendages have inspired the design of many types of artificial…
Many eukaryotic microorganisms propelled by multiple flagella can swim very rapidly with distinct gaits. Here, we model a three-dimensional mutiflagellate swimming strategy, resembling the microalgae, and investigate the effects of…
Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…
The motion of active polymers in a porous medium is shown to depend critically on flexibilty, activity and degree of polymerization. For given Peclet number, we observe a transition from localisation to diffusion as the stiffness of the…
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…
To rotate continuously without jamming, the flagellar filaments of bacteria need to be locked in phase. While several models have been proposed for eukaryotic flagella, the synchronization of bacterial flagella is less well understood.…
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…
We investigate the dynamics of a pair of rigid rotating helices in a viscous fluid, as a model for bacterial flagellar bundle and a prototype of microfluidic pumps. Combining experiments with hydrodynamic modeling, we examine how spacing…
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…