Related papers: Chemotactic drift speed for bacterial motility pat…
Self-sustained turbulent structures have been observed in a wide range of living fluids, yet no quantitative theory exists to explain their properties. We report experiments on active turbulence in highly concentrated 3D suspensions of…
Microbiology is the science of microbes, particularly bacteria. Many bacteria are motile: they are capable of self-propulsion. Among these, a significant class execute so-called run-and-tumble motion: they follow a fairly straight path for…
Bacterial contamination of biological conducts, catheters or water resources is a major threat to public health and can be amplified by the ability of bacteria to swim upstream. The mechanisms of this rheotaxis, the reorientation with…
Cell migration in vivo is often guided by chemical signals. Such chemotaxis, such as performed by immune cells migrating to a wound site, is complicated by the complex geometry inside living tissues. In this study, we extend our theoretical…
When placed in flows with local shear, flagellated bacteria commonly display reorientations towards the local vorticity direction, a chirality-induced rheotactic behavior of great importance for many biological functions. As the observed…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
We study the migration of chemotactic wild-type Escherichia coli populations in semisolid (soft) agar in the concentration range C = 0.15-0.5% (w/v). For C < 0.35%, expanding bacterial colonies display characteristic chemotactic rings. At C…
To swim through a viscous fluid, a flagellated bacterium must overcome the fluid drag on its body by rotating a flagellum or a bundle of multiple flagella. Because the drag increases with the size of bacteria, it is expected theoretically…
Extending the classic works of Berg and Purcell on the biophysics of bacterial chemotaxis, we find the optimal chemotactic strategy for the peritrichous bacterium E. Coli in the high and low signal to noise ratio limits. The optimal…
Chemotactic cells establish cell polarity in the absence of external guidance cues. Such self-organized polarity is induced by spontaneous symmetry breaking in the intracellular activities, which produces an emergent memory effect…
Magnetotactic bacteria moving on circular orbits form hydrodynamically bound states. When close to a surface and with the tilting of the field in a direction close to the perpendicular to this surface these swarms move perpendicularly to…
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…
Migrating cells exhibit various motility patterns, resulting from different migration mechanisms, cell properties, or cell-environment interactions. The complexity of cell dynamics is reflected, e.g., in the diversity of the observed forms…
The hydrodynamic limit for a kinetic model of chemotaxis is investigated. The limit equation is a non local conservation law, for which finite time blow-up occurs, giving rise to measure-valued solutions and discontinuous velocities. An…
E.coli serves as prototype for the study of peritrichous enteric bacteria that perform runs and tumbles alternately. Bacteria run forward as a result of the counterclockwise (CCW) rotation of their flagella bundle and perform tumbles when…
The chemotaxis pathway in the bacterium Escherichia coli allows cells to detect changes in external ligand concentration (e.g. nutrients). The pathway regulates the flagellated rotary motors and hence the cells' swimming behaviour, steering…
Magnetotactic swimmers tend to align along magnetic field lines against stochastic reorientations. We show that the swimming strategy, e.g. active Brownian motion versus run-and-tumble dynamics, strongly affects the orientation statistics.…
In this fluid mechanics video, we explore the kinematics of chemotaxing sperm cells (sea urchin, \textit{Arbacia punctulata}) swimming in a chemoattractant gradient. We demonstrate that the complex swimming trajectories resulting in…
Organisms must acquire and use environmental information to guide their behaviors. However, it is unclear whether and how information quantitatively limits behavioral performance. Here, we relate information to behavioral performance in…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…