Related papers: Drift and behavior of E. coli cells
A wide spectrum of Peritrichous bacteria undergo considerable physiological changes when they are inoculated onto nutrition-rich surfaces and exhibit a rapid and collective migration denoted as swarming. Thereby, the length of such swarmer…
Escherichia coli and other bacteria use rotating helical filaments to swim. Each cell typically has about four filaments, which bundle or disperse depending on the sense of motor rotation. To study the bundling process, we built a…
The unicellular microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is widely recognized as a premier model living microswimmer for physicists and biophysicists. However, the interest around C. reinhardtii goes beyond its swimming capabilities. In fact,…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
Aerotaxis is the particular form of chemotaxis in which oxygen plays the role of both the attractant and the repellent. Aerotaxis occurs without methylation adaptation, and it leads to fast and complete aggregation toward the most favorable…
Motile bacteria are known to accumulate at surfaces, eventually leading to changes in bacterial motility and bio-film formation. We use a novel two-colour, three-dimensional Lagrangian tracking technique, to follow simultaneously the body…
The Brownian dynamics of a single microorganism coupled by chemotaxis to a diffusing concentration field which is secreted by the microorganism itself is studied by computer simulations in spatial dimensions $d=1,2,3$. Both cases of a…
Microswimmers in nature often experience spatial gradients of viscosity. In this work we develop theoretical results for the dynamics of active particles, biological or otherwise, swimming through viscosity gradients. We model the active…
Motility is fundamental to the survival and proliferation of microorganisms. The E. coli bacterium propels itself using a bundle of rotating helical flagella. If one flagellum reverses its rotational direction, it leaves the bundle,…
Aggregation of chemotactic bacteria under a unimodal distribution of chemical cues was investigated by Monte Carlo (MC) simulation based on a kinetic transport equation, which considers an internal adaptation dynamics as well as a finite…
Biological functionality of cellular aggregates is largely influenced by the activity and displacements of individual constituent cells. From a theoretical perspective this activity can be characterized by hydrodynamic transport…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
Cells and microorganisms adopt various strategies to migrate in response to different environmental stimuli. To date, many modeling research has focused on the crawling-based Dictyostelium discoideum (Dd) cells migration induced by…
Many eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients by directly measuring spatial concentration differences. The precision of such gradient sensing is limited by fluctuations in the binding of diffusing particles to specific…
The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…
Self-generated gradients (SGG) provide robust steering cues that guide cells in their long-distance expeditions during embryonic development, immune response, and cancer metastasis. Cells generate their own local, dynamic gradients by…
Active particles (living or synthetic) often move through inhomogeneous environments, such as gradients in light, heat or nutrient concentration, that can lead to directed motion (or taxis). Recent research has explored inhomogeneity in the…
Hydrodynamics and confinement dominate bacterial mobility near solid or air-water boundaries, causing flagellated bacteria to move in circular trajectories. This phenomenon results from the counter-rotation between the bacterial body and…
Bacteria track chemical gradients using a biased random walk, a process called chemotaxis. Experiments suggest that bacteria also communicate during this process. Using a mathematical model, we find that sufficiently strong communication…
Bacterial chemotactic sensing converts noisy chemical signals into running and tumbling. We analyze the static sensing limits of mixed Tar/Tsr chemoreceptor clusters in individual Escherichia coli cells using a heterogeneous…