Related papers: 3D spatial exploration by E. coli echoes motor tem…
Hypothesis: Bacterial contamination of surfaces poses a major threat to public health. Designing effective antibacterial or self-cleaning surfaces requires understanding how bacteria-laden droplets interact with solid substrates and how…
The response of microbes to external signals is mediated by biochemical networks with intrinsic time scales. These time scales give rise to a memory that impacts cellular behaviour. Here we study theoretically the role of cellular memory in…
Cytoskeletal motor proteins are involved in major intracellular transport processes which are vital for maintaining appropriate cellular function. The motor exhibits distinct states of motility: active motion along filaments, and…
Bacteria in bulk fluids swim collectively and display fascinating emergent dynamics. Although bacterial collective swimming in three-dimensional (3D) geometries has been well studied, its counterpart in confined two-dimensional (2D)…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
Run-and-tumble is a basic model of persistent motion and a motility strategy widespread in micro-organisms and individual cells. In many natural settings, movement occurs in the presence of confinement. While accumulation at the surface has…
Suspensions of swimming bacteria interact hydrodynamically over long ranges, organizing themselves into collective states that drive large-scale chaotic flows, often referred to as "bacterial turbulence". Despite extensive experimental and…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
Organisms use specialized sensors to measure their environments, but the fundamental principles that determine their accuracy remain largely unknown. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, we previously found that gradient-climbing speed is…
We investigate a model for spatial epidemics explicitly taking into account bi-directional movements between base and destination locations on individual mobility networks. We provide a systematic analysis of generic dynamical features of…
In nature, microorganisms must often cope with hostile environmental conditions. To do so they have developed sophisticated cooperative behavior and intricate communication capabilities, such as: direct cell-cell physical interactions via…
Flagellar motors enable bacteria to navigate their environments by switching rotation direction in response to external cues with high sensitivity. Previous work suggested that ultrasensitivity of the flagellar motor originates from…
Motivated by subdiffusive motion of bio-molecules observed in living cells we study the stochastic properties of a non-Brownian particle whose motion is governed by either fractional Brownian motion or the fractional Langevin equation and…
In a classic paper, Edward Purcell analysed the dynamics of flagellated bacterial swimmers and derived a geometrical relationship which optimizes the propulsion efficiency. Experimental measurements for wild-type bacterial species E. coli…
The metabolic network plays a crucial role in regulating bacterial metabolism and growth, but it is subject to inherent molecular stochasticity. Previous studies have utilized flux balance analysis and the maximum entropy method to predict…
Bacterial cellulose biofilms are complex networks of strong interwoven nanofibers that control transport and protect bacterial colonies in the film. Design of diverse applications of bacterial cellulose films also relies on understanding…
Bacteria can adjust their swimming behaviour in response to chemical variations, a phenomenon known as chemotaxis. This process is characterised by a drift velocity that depends non-linearly on the concentration of chemical species and its…
The course of a peritrichous bacterium such as E. coli crucially depends on the level of synchronization and self-organization of several rotating flagella. However, the rotation of each flagellum generates counter body movements which in…
We study a simple run-and-tumble random walk whose switching frequency from run mode to tumble mode and the reverse depend on a stochastic signal. We consider a particularly sharp, step-like dependence, where the run to tumble switching…
We use in vivo measurements of swimming bacteria in an optical trap to determine fundamental properties of bacterial propulsion. In particular, we determine the propulsion matrix, which relates the angular velocity of the flagellum to the…