Related papers: Hydrodynamics of bacteriophage migration along bac…
Many bacteria rely on active cell appendages, such as type IV pili, to move over substrates and interact with neighboring cells. Here, we study the motion of individual cells and bacterial colonies, mediated by the collective interactions…
Cilia and flagella often exhibit synchronized behavior; this includes phase locking, as seen in {\it Chlamydomonas}, and metachronal wave formation in the respiratory cilia of higher organisms. Since the observations by Gray and Rothschild…
The beating flagella of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii play a prominent role in cellular mechanics, enabling cells to both displace and sense surrounding fluid. Specifically, flagellum-induced fluid transport enables microalgae to…
We analyse the motion of a flagellated bacterium in a two-fluid medium using slender body theory. The two-fluid model is useful for describing a body moving through a complex fluid with a microstructure whose length scale is comparable to…
The course of a peritrichous bacterium such as E. coli crucially depends on the level of synchronization and self-organization of several rotating flagella. However, the rotation of each flagellum generates counter body movements which in…
This article presents a novel computational model to study the selective filtering of biological hydrogels due to the surface charge and size of diffusing particles. It is the first model that includes the random 3D fiber orientation and…
Flagellar motors enable bacteria to navigate their environments by switching rotation direction in response to external cues with high sensitivity. Previous work suggested that ultrasensitivity of the flagellar motor originates from…
We study a synthetic system of motile Escherichia coli bacteria encapsulated inside giant lipid vesicles. Forces exerted by the bacteria on the inner side of the membrane are sufficient to extrude membrane tubes filled with one or several…
In the absence of environmental cues, a migrating cell performs an isotropic random motion. Recently, the breaking of this isotropy has been observed when cells move in the presence of asymmetric adhesive patterns. However, up to now the…
It is well known that flagellated bacteria swim in circles near surfaces. However, recent experiments have shown that a sulfide-oxidizing bacterium named Thiovulum majus can transition from swimming in circles to a surface bound state where…
Dynamic organization of the cytoskeletal filaments and rod-like proteins in the cell membrane and other biological interfaces occurs in many cellular processes. Previous modeling studies have considered the dynamics of a single rod on fluid…
Self-propelling bacteria are a dream of nano-technology. These unicellular organisms are not just capable of living and reproducing, but they can swim very efficiently, sense the environment and look for food, all packaged in a body…
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…
Bacteria and phages have been in an ongoing arms race for billions of years. To resist phages bacteria have evolved numerous defense systems, which nevertheless are still overcome by counter-defense mechanisms of specific phages. These…
Motile bacteria are known to accumulate at surfaces, eventually leading to changes in bacterial motility and bio-film formation. We use a novel two-colour, three-dimensional Lagrangian tracking technique, to follow simultaneously the body…
We systematically investigate how flagellar morphology governs the stability of bacterial Brownian motion, evaluating the effectiveness of a simplified chiral two-body model. This model, which effectively captures the specific bacterial…
The terminase motors of bacteriophages have been shown to be among the strongest active machines in the biomolecular world, being able to package several tens of kilobase pairs of viral genome into a capsid within minutes. Yet these motors…
Phagocytosis is the process by which cells, which are 5 to 10 times larger than the particle size, engulf particles, holding substantial importance in various biological contexts ranging from the nutrient uptake of unicellular organisms to…
Run-and-tumble (RT) motion is commonly observed in flagellated microswimmers, arising from synchronous and asynchronous flagellar beating. One such example is a biflagellated alga, called \textit{Chlamydomonas reinhardtii}. Its flagellar…
We describe a new kind of self-propelling motion of bacteria based on the cooperative action of rotating flagella on the surface of bacteria. Describing the ensemble of rotating flagella in the framework of the hydrodynamics with spin the…