Related papers: Swimming of peritrichous bacteria is enabled by an…
Flexible filaments moving in viscous fluids are ubiquitous in the natural microscopic world. For example, the swimming of bacteria and spermatozoa as well as important physiological functions at organ-level, such as the cilia-induced motion…
A growing body of work aims at designing and testing micron-scale synthetic swimmers. One method, inspired by the locomotion of flagellated bacteria, consists of applying a rotating magnetic field to a rigid, helically-shaped, propeller…
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…
We show that the recent experimental observation of the rectification of swimming bacteria in a system with an array of asymmetric barriers occurs due to the ballistic component of the bacteria trajectories introduced by the bacterial…
To rotate continuously without jamming, the flagellar filaments of bacteria need to be locked in phase. While several models have been proposed for eukaryotic flagella, the synchronization of bacterial flagella is less well understood.…
Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…
Flagellated bacteria exploiting helical propulsion are known to swim along circular trajectories near surfaces. Fluid dynamics predicts this circular motion to be clockwise (CW) above a rigid surface (when viewed from inside the fluid) and…
The near-surface swimming patterns of bacteria are strongly determined by the hydrodynamic interactions between bacteria and the surface, which trap bacteria in smooth circular trajectories that lead to inefficient surface exploration.…
We study the microscale propulsion of a rotating helical filament confined by a cylindrical tube, using a boundary-element method for Stokes flow that accounts for helical symmetry. We determine the effect of confinement on swimming speed…
The accumulation of swimming bacteria near surfaces may lead to biological processes such as biofilm formation and wound infection. Previous experimental observations of Vibrio alginolyticus showed an interesting correlation between the…
Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…
Many bacteria use rotating helical flagellar filaments to swim. The filaments undergo polymorphic transformations in which the helical pitch and radius change abruptly. These transformations arise in response to mechanical loading, changes…
Eukaryotic flagella are active structures with a complex architecture of microtubules, motor proteins and elastic links. They are capable of whiplike motions driven by motors sliding along filaments that are themselves constrained at an…
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
In many situations bacteria move in complex environments, as for example in soils, oceans or the human gut-track microbiome. In these natural environments, carrier fluids such as mucus or reproductive fluids show complex structure…
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…
Bacterial contamination of biological conducts, catheters or water resources is a major threat to public health and can be amplified by the ability of bacteria to swim upstream. The mechanisms of this rheotaxis, the reorientation with…
We study the transport of bacteria in a porous media modeled by a square channel containing one cylindrical obstacle via molecular dynamics simulations coupled to a lattice Boltzmann fluid. Our bacteria model is a rod-shaped rigid body…
Microbial flagellates typically inhabit complex suspensions of polymeric material which can impact the swimming speed of motile microbes, filter-feeding of sessile cells, and the generation of biofilms. There is currently a need to better…
Run-and-tumble motility is widely used by swimming microorganisms including numerous prokaryotic eukaryotic organisms. Here, we experimentally investigate the run-and-tumble dynamics of the bacterium E. coli in polymeric solutions. We find…