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In a fluid environment, flagellated microswimmers propel themselves by rotating their flagella. The morphology of these flagella significantly influences forward speed, swimming efficiency, and directional stability, which are critical for…
Many biological microorganisms and artificial microswimmers react to external cues of environmental gradients by changing their swimming directions. We study here the behavior of eukarytic flagellated microswimmers in linear viscosity…
Microorganisms such as algae and bacteria move in a viscous environment with extremely low Reynolds ($Re$), where the viscous drag dominates the inertial forces. They have adapted to this environment by developing specialized features such…
Recent advances in microscopy techniques has uncovered unique aspects of flagella-driven motility in bacteria. A remarkable example is the discovery of flagellar wrapping, a phenomenon whereby a bacterium wraps its flagellum (or flagellar…
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…
It is well established that the parasites of the genus Leishmania exhibit complex surface interactions with the sandfly vector midgut epithelium, but no prior study has considered the details of their hydrodynamics. Here, the boundary…
We illustrate shape mode analysis as a simple, yet powerful technique to concisely describe complex biological shapes and their dynamics. We characterize undulatory bending waves of beating flagella and reconstruct a limit cycle of…
Many eukaryotic cells use the active waving motion of flexible flagella to self-propel in viscous fluids. However, the criteria governing the selection of particular flagellar waveforms among all possible shapes has proved elusive so far.…
Metabolism unfolds within specific organelles in eukaryotic cells. Lysosomes are highly metabolically active organelles, and their metabolic states dynamically influence signal transduction, cellular homeostasis, and organismal…
How microorganisms respond to and interact with their environment can vary significantly from individual to individual, which can have important microbiological and ecological implications. However, most microscopy techniques can only…
A wide range of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, propel themselves by rotation of soft helical tails, also known as flagella. Due to the small size of these organisms, viscous forces overwhelm inertial effects and the flow is at low Reynolds…
Analysis of microscopy images is one important tool in many fields of biomedical research, as it allows the quantification of a multitude of parameters at the cellular level. However, manual counting of these images is both tiring and…
Green algae of the $Volvocine$ lineage, spanning from unicellular $Chlamydomonas$ to vastly larger $Volvox$, are models for the study of the evolution of multicellularity, flagellar dynamics, and developmental processes. Phototactic…
Microscale fluid flows generated by ensembles of beating eukaryotic flagella are crucial to fundamental processes such as development, motility and sensing. Despite significant experimental and theoretical progress, the underlying physical…
The present habilitation thesis in theoretical biological physics addresses two central dynamical processes in cells and organisms: (i) active motility and motility control and (ii) self-organized pattern formation. The unifying theme is…
Living creatures exhibit a remarkable diversity of locomotion mechanisms, evolving structures specialised for interacting with their environment. In the vast majority of cases, locomotor behaviours such as flying, crawling, and running, are…
In this paper, we analyze the inverse dynamics and control of a bacteria-inspired uniflagellar robot in a fluid medium at low Reynolds number. Inspired by the mechanism behind the locomotion of flagellated bacteria, we consider a robot…
Peritrichous bacteria synchronize and bundle their flagella to actively swim while disruption of the bundle leads to tumbling. It is still not known whether the number of flagella represents an evolutionary adaptation towards optimizing…
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…
In complex plasmas, the behavior of freely floating micrometer sized particles is studied. The particles can be directly visualized and recorded by digital video cameras. To analyze the dynamics of single particles, reliable algorithms are…