Related papers: 3D spatial exploration by E. coli echoes motor tem…
When the motion of a motile cell is observed closely, it appears erratic, and yet the combination of nonequilibrium forces and surfaces can produce striking examples of organization in microbial systems. While most of our current…
We experimentally investigate how aerotactic bacteria, confined within a thin liquid film between two solid substrates, respond to a controlled oxygen gradient. We find that the total bacterial number density dictates which mechanism…
Marine bacterium Vibrio alginolyticus uses a single polar flagellum to navigate in an aqueous environment. Similar to Escherichia coli cells, the polar flagellar motor has two states; when the motor is counter-clockwise, the cell swims…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
The hydrodynamic interactions among bacterial cell bodies, flagella, and surrounding boundaries are essential for understanding bacterial motility in complex environments. In this study, we demonstrate that each slender flagellum can be…
Recent advances in human mobility research have revealed consistent pairwise characteristics in movement behavior, yet existing mobility models often overlook the spatial and topological structure of mobility networks. By analyzing millions…
Bacterial cells navigate around their environment by directing their movement along chemical gradients. This process, known as chemotaxis, can promote the rapid expansion of bacterial populations into previously unoccupied territories.…
Radical shifts in the genetic composition of large cell populations are rare events with quite low probabilities, which direct numerical simulations generally fail to evaluate accurately. In this paper, we develop a theoretical large…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
It has been recently shown that the exponential growth rate of a population of bacterial cells starting from a single cell shows transient oscillations due to early synchronized bursts of division. These oscillations are enhanced by cell…
The mean size of exponentially dividing E. coli cells cultured in different nutrient conditions is known to depend on the mean growth rate only. However, the joint fluctuations relating cell size, doubling time and individual growth rate…
The physics of how molecules, organelles, and foreign objects move within living cells has been extensively studied in organisms ranging from bacteria to human cells. In mammalian cells, in particular, cellular vesicles move across the cell…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
Sedimentation in active fluids has come into focus due to the ubiquity of swimming micro-organisms in natural and industrial processes. Here, we investigate sedimentation dynamics of passive particles in a fluid as a function of bacteria E.…
Biofilms in porous media critically influence hydraulic properties in environmental and engineered systems. However, a mechanistic understanding of how microbial life controls permeability remains elusive. By combining microfluidics,…
In the framework of a 1D cyclic competition model, the Rock-Paper-Scissor model, where bacteria are allowed to mutate and move in space, we study the formation of stochastic patterns, where all the bacteria species do coexist. We modelled…
We study single cell E.coli chemotaxis in a spatio-temporally varying attractant environment. Modeling the attractant concentration in the form of a traveling sine wave, we measure in our simulations, the chemotactic drift velocity of the…
Bacterial swimming is well characterized in uniform liquids at rest. The natural habitat of bacterial swimmers, however, is often dominated by moving fluids and interfaces, resulting in shear flows that may strongly alter bacterial…
The effect of crowding on the run-and-tumble dynamics of swimmers such as bacteria is studied using a discrete lattice model of mutually excluding particles that move with constant velocity along a direction that is randomized at a rate…
The interior of a living cell is an active, fluctuating, and crowded environment. Yet, it maintains a high level of coherent organization, which is readily apparent in the intracellular transport network. Membrane-bound compartments called…