Related papers: Fluid flows shaping organism morphology
Many aquatic microorganisms are able to swim. In natural environments they typically do so in the presence of flows. In recent years it has been shown that the interplay of swimming and flows can give rise to interesting and biologically…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
The spontaneous emergence of collective flows is a generic property of active fluids and often leads to chaotic flow patterns characterised by swirls, jets, and topological disclinations in their orientation field. However, the ability to…
The slime mould Physarum polycephalum displays adaptive transport dynamics and network formation that have inspired its use as a model of biological computation. We develop a Lagrangian formulation of Physarum's adaptive dynamics on…
Plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is a single cell visible by unaided eye. During its foraging behaviour the cell spans spatially distributed sources of nutrients with a protoplasmic network. Geometrical structure of the protoplasmic…
Bacteria commonly live in structured communities that affect human health and influence ecological systems. Heterogeneous populations, such as motile and non-motile populations, often coexist in bacteria communities. Motile subpopulations…
Swimming organisms in their natural habitat navigate through a wide array of geometries and chemical environments. Interaction with the boundaries is ubiquitous and can significantly modify the swimming characteristics of the organism as…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
Large scale motion of cytoplasm called cytoplasmic streaming occurs in some large eukaryotic cells to stir the cell's constituents. In Drosophila oocytes, microtubules have been observed to undergo undulating motion, curving to form…
In biology, cells undergo deformations under the action of flow caused by the fluid surrounding them. These flows lead to shape changes and instabilities that have been explored in detail for single component vesicles. However, cell…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
The diffusion of active microscopic organisms in complex environments plays an important role in a wide range of biological phenomena from cell colony growth to single organism transport. Here, we investigate theoretically and…
Mechanochemical processes on surfaces such as the cellular cortex or epithelial sheets, play a key role in determining patterns and shape changes of biological systems. To understand the complex interplay of hydrodynamics and material flows…
Biofilms are complex, self-organized consortia of microorganisms that produce a functional, protective matrix of biomolecules. Physically, the structure of a biofilm can be described as an entangled polymer network which grows and changes…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
Network fluids are structured fluids consisting of chains and branches. They are characterized by unusual physical properties, such as, exotic bulk phase diagrams, interfacial roughening and wetting transitions, and equilibrium and…
The motility of microorganisms is often biased by gradients in physical and chemical properties of their environment, with myriad implications on their ecology. Here we show that fluid acceleration reorients gyrotactic plankton, triggering…
There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…
Transitions from turbulence to order are studied experimentally in thin fluid layers and magnetically confined toroidal plasma. It is shown that turbulence self-organizes through the mechanism of spectral condensation. The spectral…
Planktonic organisms, despite their passive drift in the ocean, exhibit complex responses to fluid flow, including escape behaviors and larval settlement detection. But what flow signals can they perceive? This paper addresses this question…