Related papers: Biological Fluid Mechanics Under the Microscope: A…
Motile cilia are a striking example of functional cellular organelle, conserved across all the eukaryotic species. Motile cilia allow swimming of cells and small organisms and transport of liquids across epithelial tissues. Whilst the…
Paul Blainey is professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. In this contribution he describes three microfluidic technologies that he and his team has developed to extend the capability, accessibility, and applications of microfluidics: (1)…
The physiological tradition of biological research analyzes biological systems using reduced descriptions much as an engineer uses a 'black box' description of an amplifier. Simple models have been used by physiologists for a very long…
Motivated by recent advances in vesicle engineering, we consider theoretically the locomotion of shape-changing bilayer vesicles at low Reynolds number. By modulating their volume and membrane composition, the vesicles can be made to change…
Sabeth Verpoorte is professor at the University of Groningen. In this contribution she describes the development of a microfluidic incubation system for drug metabolism studies using a "top-down" precision-cut tissue slice model. She also…
The mobility of particles in fluid membranes is a fundamental aspect of many biological processes. In a 1975 paper [1], Saffman and Delbr\"uck demonstrated how the presence of external Stokesian solvents is crucial in regularising the…
Many microorganisms swim in fluids with complex rheological properties. Although much is now understood about motion of these swimmers in Newtonian fluids, the understanding is still developing in non-Newtonian fluids --- this understanding…
Small-scale locomotion plays an important role in biology. Different modelling approaches have been proposed in the past. The simplest model is an infinite inextensible two-dimensional waving sheet, {originally introduced by Taylor}, which…
The flow of fluids at branching junctions plays important kinematic and dynamic roles in most biological and industrial flow systems. The present paper highlights some key issues related to the flow of fluids at these junctions with special…
Typical bodily and environmental fluids encountered by biological swimmers consist of dissolved macromolecules such as proteins and polymers, often rendering them non Newtonian. To mimic such scenarios, we investigate the motion of swimming…
The study of vesicles under flow, a model system for red blood cells (RBCs), is an essential step in understanding various intricate dynamics exhibited by RBCs in vivo and in vitro. Quantitative 3D analyses of vesicles under flow are…
Single-molecule biophysics has transformed our understanding of the fundamental molecular processes involved in living biological systems, but also of the fascinating physics of life. Far more exotic than a collection of exemplars of soft…
The intricate wobbling motion of flagellated bacteria, characterized by the periodic precession of the cell body, is a determinant factor in their motility and navigation within complex fluid environments. While well-studied in quiescent…
Complex fluids, such as polymer solutions and blends, colloids and gels, are of growing interest in fundamental and applied soft-condensed-matter science. A common feature of all such systems is the presence of a mesoscopic structural…
Stephen Quake is the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Here he reviews the early history of microfluidics and discusses more recent developments, with a focus on applications in biology and…
Embryogenesis, the process by which an organism forms and develops, has long been and still is a major field of investigation in the natural sciences. By which means, which forces, are embryonic cells and tissues assembled, deformed, and…
We study the Brownian motion of microbeads immersed in water and in a viscoelastic wormlike micelles solution by optical trapping interferometry and diffusing wave spectroscopy. Through the mean-square displacement obtained from both…
A number of swimming microorganisms such as ciliates ($\textit{Opalina}$) and multicellular colonies of flagellates ($\textit{Volvox}$) are approximately spherical in shape and swim using beating arrays of cilia or short flagella covering…
Accurate and efficient fluid flow models are essential for applications relating to many physical phenomena including geophysical, aerodynamic, and biological systems. While these flows may exhibit rich and multiscale dynamics, in many…
We study the fluid drift due to a time-dependent dumbbell model of a microswimmer. The model captures important aspects of real microswimmers such as a time-dependent flagellar motion and a no-slip body. The model consists of a rigid sphere…