Related papers: How bacterial cells and colonies move on solid sub…
Continuum models for the spatial dynamics of growing cell populations have been widely used to investigate the mechanisms underpinning tissue development and tumour invasion. These models consist of nonlinear partial differential equations…
Motile biological cells in tissue often display the phenomenon of durotaxis, i.e. they tend to move towards stiffer parts of substrate tissue. The mechanism for this behavior is not completely understood. We consider simplified models for…
We study the spreading of a bacterial colony undergoing turbulent like collective motion. We present two minimalistic models to investigate the interplay between population growth and coherent structures arising from turbulence. Using…
Substrate-based cell motility is essential for fundamental biological processes, such as tissue growth, wound healing and immune response. Even if a comprehensive understanding of this motility mode remains elusive, progress has been…
Bacterial processes ranging from gene expression to motility and biofilm formation are constantly challenged by internal and external noise. While the importance of stochastic fluctuations has been appreciated for chemotaxis, it is…
Eukaryotic cell motility is crucial during development, wound healing, the immune response, and cancer metastasis. Some eukaryotic cells can swim, but cells more commonly adhere to and crawl along the extracellular matrix. We study the…
Motility is an essential factor for an organism's survival and diversification. With the advent of novel single-cell technologies, analytical frameworks and theoretical methods, we can begin to probe the complex lives of microscopic motile…
When treated with antibiotics below the minimum inhibitory concentration, bacterial cell division turns off, but cell growth does not. Thus, rod-like bacteria, including E. coli, can elongate many times their length without increasing their…
We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…
Bacteria typically reside in heterogeneous environments with various chemogradients where motile cells can gain an advantage over non-motile cells. Since motility is energetically costly, cells must optimize their swimming speed and…
Although the motility of the flagellated bacteria, Escherichia coli, has been widely studied, the effect of viscosity on swimming speed remains controversial. The swimming mode of wild-type E.coli is often idealized as a "run-and- tumble"…
Run-and-tumble is a common but vital strategy that bacteria employ to explore environment suffused with boundaries, as well as to escape from entrapment. In this study we reveal how this strategy and the resulting dynamical behavior can be…
Locomotion is essential for living cells. It enables bacteria and algae to explore space for food, cancer to spread, and immune system to fight infections. Motile cells display trajectories of intriguing complexity, from regular (e.g.…
Bacteria regulate their motility through a variety of mechanisms, including quorum sensing (QS) and other density-dependent responses mediated by diffusible signals. While nonlinear density-dependent motility is well known in active-matter…
Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively…
Mechanical forces are obviously important in the assembly of three-dimensional multicellular structures, but their detailed role is often unclear. We have used growing microcolonies of the bacterium \emph{Escherichia coli} to investigate…
Soft surfaces, spanning vastly different environmental and biomedical settings, are frequently colonised by surface-associated bacteria. Yet, how soft surfaces govern bacterial dynamics and their self-organisation into colonies remains…
Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…
Bacteria often traverse confined spaces to perform critical functions in symbiosis, infection, drug delivery, and soil bioremediation. While the canonical run-and-tumble strategy enables exploration, its reliance on constant sensing and…
The run-and-tumble dynamics of bacteria, as exhibited by \textit{E. coli}, offers a simple experimental realization of non-Brownian, yet diffusive, particles. Here we present some analytic and numerical results for models of the ideal…