Related papers: Nutrient transport driven by microbial active carp…
Patchy particles are a class of colloids with functionalized surfaces. Through surface functionalization, the strength and directionality of the colloidal interactions are tunable allowing control over coordination of the particle.…
Catalytically active particles suspended in a liquid can move due to self-phoresis by generating solute gradients via chemical reactions of the solvent occurring at parts of their surface. Such particles can be used as carriers at the…
Intracellular transport of vesicular cargos, organelles, and other macromolecules is an essential process to move large items through a crowded, and inhomogeneous cellular environment. In an effort to dissect the fundamental effects of…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental aspects of many living and engineering systems. Here, the scale of biological agents covers a wide range, from nanomotors, cytoskeleton, and cells, to insects, fish, birds, and people. Inspired…
Directed motion up a concentration gradient is crucial for the survival and maintenance of numerous biological systems, such as sperms moving towards an egg during fertilization or ciliates moving towards a food source. In these systems,…
Active fluctuations are detected in a growing number of systems due to self-propulsion mechanisms or collisions with active environment. They drive the system far from equilibrium and can induce phenomena which at equilibrium states are…
Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide…
Molecular signalling in living cells occurs at low copy numbers and is thereby inherently limited by the noise imposed by thermal diffusion. The precision at which biochemical receptors can count signalling molecules is intimately related…
We numerically examine the driven transport of an overdamped self-propelled particle through a two-dimensional array of circular obstacles. A detailed analysis of transport quantifiers (mobility and diffusivity) has been performed for two…
Bacterial cellulose is an important class of biomaterials which can be grown in well-controlled laboratory and industrial conditions. The cellulose structure is affected by several biological, chemical and environmental factors, including…
Biomolecular condensates help organize the cell cytoplasm and nucleoplasm into spatial compartments with different chemical compositions. A key feature of such compositional patterning is the local enrichment of enzymatically active…
In growing active matter systems, a large collection of engineered or living autonomous units metabolize free energy and create order at different length scales as they proliferate and migrate collectively. One such example is bacterial…
Recent studies have shown that packings of cells, both eukaryotic cellular tissues and growing or swarming bacterial colonies, can often be understood as active nematic fluids. A key property of volume-conserving active nematic model…
Inside cells, various cargos are transported by teams of molecular motors. Intriguingly, the motors involved generally have opposite pulling directions, and the resulting cargo dynamics is a biased stochastic motion. It is an open question…
We quantitatively study the transport of E. coli near the walls of confined microfluidic channels, and in more detail along the edges formed by the interception of two perpendicular walls. Our experiments establish the connection between…
We study the dynamics of micron-sized particles on a layer of motile cells. This cell carpet acts as an active bath that propels passive tracer particles via direct mechanical contact. The resulting nonequilibrium transport shows a…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
The self-organised motion of vast numbers of creatures in a single direction is a spectacular example of emergent order. We recreate this phenomenon using actuated non-living components. We report here that millimetre-sized tapered rods,…
Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…