Related papers: Fluid flows shaping organism morphology
The Physarum network expands or retracts in response to environmental stimuli, demonstrating an intelligent adaptive capability to locate optimal paths for nutrient transport. The underlying physical mechanism governing this intelligence…
A qualitative model is presented, suggesting gravitational information is transduced into biological systems primarily by its effect on spatially organised membrane and cytoplasmic flows. Continuous low affinity interactions between…
Biological membranes are host to proteins and molecules which may form domain-like structures resulting in spatially-varying material properties. Vesicles with such heterogeneous membranes can exhibit intricate shapes at equilibrium and…
The past few years have seen many advances in our understanding of the dynamics of polymeric fluids. These include improvements on the successful reptation theory; an emerging molecular theory of semiflexible chain dynamics; and an…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
The giant single-celled slime mould Physarum polycephalum has inspired rapid develop- ments in unconventional computing substrates since the start of this century. This is primarily due to its simple component parts and the distributed…
Despite their importance in many biological, ecological and physical processes, microorganismal fluid flows under tight confinement have not been investigated experimentally. Strong screening of Stokelets in this geometry suggests that the…
Self-regulation of living tissue as an example of self-organization phenomena in hierarchical systems of biological, ecological, and social nature is under consideration. The characteristic feature of these systems is the absence of any…
Plants live in constantly moving fluid, whether air or water. In response to the loads associated with fluid motion, plants bend and twist, often with great amplitude. These large deformations are not found in traditional engineering…
Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled, multi-nucleated slime mold whose body constitutes a network of veins. As it explores its environment, it adapts and optimizes its network to external stimuli. It has been shown to exhibit complex…
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…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
The slime mould Physarum polycephalum is known to construct proto- plasmic transport networks which approximate proximity graphs by forag- ing for nutrients during its plasmodial life cycle stage. In these networks, nodes are represented by…
When interacting motile units self-organize into flocks, they realize one of the most robust ordered state found in nature. However, after twenty five years of intense research, the very mechanism controlling the ordering dynamics of both…
Many cells face search problems, such as finding food, mates or shelter, where their success depends on their search strategy. In contrast to other unicellular organisms, the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms a giant network-shaped…
The aim of this work is to quantify the spatio-temporal dynamics of flow-driven amoeboid locomotion in small ($\sim$100 $\mu$m) fragments of the true slime mold \phys {\it polycephalum}. In this model organism, cellular contraction drives…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
We review the dynamical behavior of giant fluid vesicles in various types of external hydrodynamic flow. The interplay between stresses arising from membrane elasticity, hydrodynamic flows, and the ever present thermal fluctuations leads to…
Plasmodium of acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a very large eukaryotic microbe visible to the unaided eye. During its foraging behaviour the plasmodium spans sources of nutrients with a network of protoplasmic tubes. In this…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…