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It has been shown that self-assembled chains of active colloidal particles can present sustained oscillations. These oscillations are possible because of the effective diffusiophoretic forces that mediate the interactions of colloids do not…
We study a slender filament beating in a viscous fluid with novel curvature-dependent bending stiffness. Our numerical and experimental investigations reveal that such differential stiffness can sustain planar bending waves far along…
We demonstrate that internal pivot-like defects, arising from rigor mutant motor proteins that bind without stepping, fundamentally reshape the dynamics of semiflexible filaments in two-dimensional motility assays. Using large-scale…
Certain bacteria form filamentous colonies when the cells fail to separate after dividing. In Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus thermus, and cyanobacteria, the filaments can wrap into complex supercoiled structures as the cells grow. The…
It is now well established that nearby beating pairs of eukaryotic flagella or cilia typically synchronize in phase. A substantial body of evidence supports the hypothesis that hydrodynamic coupling between the active filaments, combined…
Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity.…
Many types of bacteria swim by rotating a bundle of helical filaments also called flagella. Each filament is driven by a rotary motor and a very flexible hook transmits the motor torque to the filament. We model it by discretizing…
Many swimming microorganisms, such as bacteria and sperm, use flexible flagella to move through viscoelastic media in their natural environments. In this paper we address the effects a viscoelastic fluid has on the motion and beating…
Cilia and flagella are actively bending slender organelles, performing functions such as motility, feeding and embryonic symmetry breaking. We review the mechanics of viscous-dominated microscale flow, including time-reversal symmetry, drag…
The fluid-structure interactions between flexible fibers and viscous flows play an essential role in various biological phenomena, medical problems, and industrial processes. Of particular interest is the case of particles freely…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…
Axonemal dyneins are the molecular motors responsible for the beating of cilia and flagella. These motors generate sliding forces between adjacent microtubule doublets within the axoneme, the motile cytoskeletal structure inside the…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
Non-conservative loads of the follower type are usually believed to be the source of dynamic instabilities such as flutter and divergence. It is shown that these instabilities (including Hopf bifurcation, flutter, divergence, and…
Effective organismal behavior responds appropriately to changes in the surrounding environment. Attaining this delicate balance of sensitivity and stability is a hallmark of the animal kingdom. By studying the locomotory behavior of a…
We consider the dynamics of a rigid filament in a motor protein assay under external loading. The motor proteins are modeled as active harmonic linkers with tail ends immobilized on a substrate. Their heads attach to the filament…
The dynamics of filaments in flow are central to understanding a wide range of biological and soft-matter systems, yet their behavior under time-dependent forcing remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the long-time dynamics of…
Initially straight slender elastic rods with geometrically constrained ends buckle and form stable two-dimensional shapes when compressed by bringing the ends together. It is also known that beyond a critical value of the pre-stress,…
Parametric instabilities are a known feature of periodically driven dynamic systems; at particular frequencies and amplitudes of the driving modulation, the system's quasi-periodic response undergoes a frequency lock-in, leading to a…
We investigate the sliding strength of thin filaments in frictional contact with a translating cylinder, perpendicular to the filaments' axes, in knotted (clove hitch) and unknotted (capstan) configurations. Recent work reported superlinear…