Related papers: Fluid flows shaping organism morphology
A variety of complex fluids consist in soft, round objects (foams, emulsions, assemblies of copolymer micelles or of multilamellar vesicles -- also known as onions). Their dense packing induces a slight deviation from their prefered…
Cilia and flagella are actively bending slender organelles, performing functions such as motility, feeding and embryonic symmetry breaking. We review the mechanics of viscous-dominated microscale flow, including time-reversal symmetry, drag…
Plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is a single cell visible by unaided eye. During its foraging behavior the cell spans spatially distributed sources of nutrients with a protoplasmic network. Geometrical structure of the protoplasmic…
Lipid bilayer membranes are the fundamental biological barriers that permit life. The bilayer dynamics largely participates in orchestrating cellular workings and is characterized by substantial stability together with extreme plasticity…
Slime mould of Physarum polycephalum is a large cell exhibiting rich spatial non-linear electrical characteristics. We exploit the electrical properties of the slime mould to implement logic gates using a flexible hardware platform designed…
In a cell or microorganism the processes that generate mass, energy, information transfer, and cell fate specification are seamlessly integrated through a complex network of various cellular constituents and reactions. However, despite the…
Activity can organize matter in unique configurations inaccessible to equilibrium systems, including a sundry of spiraling shapes seen in nature that range from galaxies to living tissues to fossilized stromatolites. How these dynamic yet…
Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…
Turbulence has been recognized as a factor of paramount importance for the survival or extinction of sinking phytoplankton species. However, dealing with its multiscale nature in models of coupled fluid and biological dynamics is a…
We characterize the different morphologies adopted by a drop of liquid placed on two randomly oriented fibers, which is a first step toward understanding the wetting of fibrous networks. The present work reviews previous modeling for…
Swimming of microorganisms is studied from a viewpoint of extended objects (strings and membranes) swimming in the incompressible f luid of low Reynolds number. The flagellated motion is analyzed in two dimensional fluid, by using the…
We illustrate shape mode analysis as a simple, yet powerful technique to concisely describe complex biological shapes and their dynamics. We characterize undulatory bending waves of beating flagella and reconstruct a limit cycle of…
In recent years the functionality of synthetic active microparticles has edged even closer to that of their biological counterparts. However, we still lack the understanding needed to recreate at the microscale key features of autonomous…
Physarum polycephalum is a large single amoeba cell, which in its plasmodial phase,forages and connects nearby food sources with protoplasmic tubes. The organism forages for food by growing these tubes towards detected food stuffs, this…
Starting from a particle model we derive a macroscopic aggregation-diffusion equation for the evolution of slime mold under the assumption of propagation of chaos in the large particle limit. We analyze properties of the macroscopic model…
Consider a deformable body immersed in an incompressible fluid that is randomly stirred. Sticking to physical situations in which the body departs only slightly from its spherical shape, we investigate the deformations of the body. The…
Rapid advance of experimental techniques provides an unprecedented in-depth view into complex developmental processes. Still, little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and…
Biological patterns generated during development and regeneration often scale with organism size. Some organisms, e.g., flatworms, can regenerate a rescaled body plan from tissue fragments of varying sizes. Inspired by these examples, we…
Experiments on dry granular matter flowing down an inclined plane are performed in order to study the dynamics of dense pyroclastic flows. The plane is rough, and always wider than the flow, focusing this study on the case of laterally…
Living organisms rely on molecular networks, such as gene circuits and signaling pathways, for information processing and robust decision-making in crowded, noisy environments. Recent advances show that interacting biomolecules…