Related papers: Drift and behavior of E. coli cells
Concentrated suspensions of swimming microorganisms and other forms of active matter are known to display complex, self-organized spatio-temporal patterns on scales large compared to those of the individual motile units. Despite intensive…
Noise in transduction of chemotactic stimuli to the flagellar motor of E. coli will affect the random run-and-tumble motion of the cell and the ability to perform chemotaxis. Here we use numerical simulations to show that an intermediate…
Evolution has provided many organisms with sophisticated sensory systems that enable them to respond to signals in their environment. The response frequently involves alteration in the pattern of movement, such as the chemokinesis of the…
Experiments have recently shown the feasibility of utilising bacteria as micro-scale robotic devices, with special attention paid to the development of bacteria-driven micro-swimmers taking advantage of built-in actuation and sensing…
Eukaryotic cells perform chemotaxis by determining the direction of chemical gradients based on stochastic sensing of concentrations at the cell surface. To examine the efficiency of this process, previous studies have investigated the…
We characterize the full spatiotemporal gait of populations of swimming {\it Escherichia coli} using renewal processes to analyze the measurements of intermediate scattering functions. This allows us to demonstrate quantitatively how the…
Cells are constantly exposed to diverse stimuli-chemical, mechanical, or electrical-that guide their movement. In physiological conditions, these signals often overlap, as seen during infections, where neutrophils and dendritic cells…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
Complex biological systems are very robust to genetic and environmental changes at all levels of organization. Many biological functions of Escherichia coli metabolism can be sustained against single-gene or even multiple-gene mutations by…
Kinetic-transport equations are, by now, standard models to describe the dynamics of populations of bacteria moving by run-and-tumble. Experimental observations show that bacteria increase their run duration when encountering an increasing…
We discuss recent progress in the theoretical description of chemotaxis by coupling the diffusion equation of a chemical species to equations describing the motion of sensing microorganisms. In particular, we discuss models for…
The hydrodynamic limit of a one dimensional kinetic model describing chemotaxis is investigated. The limit system is a conservation law coupled to an elliptic problem for which the macroscopic velocity is possibly discontinuous. Therefore,…
The chemotaxis pathway of the bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides has many similarities to the well-studied pathway in Escherichia coli. It exhibits robust adaptation and has several homologues of the latter's chemotaxis proteins. Recent…
Bacteria are often exposed to multiple stimuli in complex environments, and their efficient chemotactic decisions are critical to survive and grow in their native environments. Bacterial responses to the environmental stimuli depend on the…
Can topography be used to control bacteria accumulation? We address this question in the model system of smooth-swimming and run-and-tumble \textit{Escherichia coli} swimming near a sinusoidal surface, and show that the accumulation of…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
Active navigation in disordered media depends on a biased random walk interacting with environmental constraints. Using E. coli chemotactic navigation in agar gels as a model system, we reveal a fundamental trade-off between diffusive…
We develop a maximum likelihood method to infer relevant physical properties of elongated active particles. Using individual trajectories of advected swimmers as input, we are able to accurately determine their rotational diffusion…
Motivated by observations of the dynamics of {\it Myxococcus xanthus}, we present a self-interacting random walk model that describes the competition between chemokinesis and chemotaxis. Cells are constrained to move in one dimension, but…
Interactions between swimming cells and surfaces are essential to many microbiological processes, from bacterial biofilm formation to human fertilization. However, in spite of their fundamental importance, relatively little is known about…