Related papers: Bistability in the synchronization of actuated mic…
The basic phenomenology of experimentally observed synchronization (i.e., a stochastic phase locking) of identical, beating flagella of a biflagellate alga is known to be captured well by a minimal model describing the dynamics of coupled,…
Many swimming microorganisms, such as bacteria and sperm, use flexible flagella to move through viscoelastic media in their natural environments. In this paper we address the effects a viscoelastic fluid has on the motion and beating…
Certain bacteria form filamentous colonies when the cells fail to separate after dividing. In Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus thermus, and cyanobacteria, the filaments can wrap into complex supercoiled structures as the cells grow. The…
When swimming in close proximity, some microorganisms such as spermatozoa synchronize their flagella. Previous work on swimming sheets showed that such synchronization requires a geometrical asymmetry in the flagellar waveforms. Here we…
Motile cilia beat in an asymmetric fashion in order to propel the surrounding fluid. When many cilia are located on a surface, their beating can synchronise such that their phases form metachronal waves. Here, we computationally study a…
Microorganisms such as algae and bacteria move in a viscous environment with extremely low Reynolds ($Re$), where the viscous drag dominates the inertial forces. They have adapted to this environment by developing specialized features such…
Cellular biology abound with filaments interacting through fluids, from intracellular microtubules, to rotating flagella and beating cilia. While previous work has demonstrated the complexity of capturing nonlocal hydrodynamic interactions…
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…
Cilia and flagella exhibit regular bending waves that perform mechanical work on the surrounding fluid, to propel cellular swimmers and pump fluids inside organisms. Here, we quantify a force-velocity relationship of the beating flagellum,…
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…
We model analytically the dynamics of a cytoskeletal filament in a motility assay. The filament is described as rigid rod free to slide in two dimensions. The motor proteins consist of polymeric tails tethered to the plane and modeled as…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
The modeling of the beating of cilia and flagella in fluids is a particularly active field of study, given the biological relevance of these organelles. Various mathematical models have been proposed to represent the nonlinear dynamics of…
Ciliated tissues such as in the mammalian lungs, brains, and reproductive tracts, are specialized to pump fluid. They generate flows by the collective activity of hundreds of thousands of individual cilia that beat in a striking metachronal…
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…
Nature uses elongated shapes and filaments to build stable structures, generate motion, and allow complex geometric interactions. In this Review, we examine the role of biological filaments across different length scales. From the molecular…
Many biological microswimmers can modulate their swimming gait to achieve directional control of motility, especially when performing steering towards specific directional cues. This can be achieved without the need for obvious…
Cilia and flagella are hair-like appendages that protrude from the surface of a variety of eukaryotic cells and deform in a wavelike fashion to transport fluids and propel cells. Motivated by the ubiquity of non-Newtonian fluids in biology,…
The dynamics of two planar elastic pendula mounted on the horizontally excited platform have been studied. We give evidence that the pendula can exhibit synchronous oscillatory and rotation motion and show that stable in-phase and…
Biofilament-motor protein complexes are ubiquitous in biology and drive the transport of cargo vital for many fundamental cellular processes. As they move, motor proteins exert compressive forces on the filaments to which they are attached,…