Related papers: Swimming eukaryotic microorganisms exhibit a unive…
Run-and-tumble is a basic model of persistent motion and a motility strategy widespread in micro-organisms and individual cells. In many natural settings, movement occurs in the presence of confinement. While accumulation at the surface has…
Trajectories of endosomes inside living eukaryotic cells are highly heterogeneous in space and time and diffuse anomalously due to a combination of viscoelasticity, caging, aggregation and active transport. Some of the trajectories display…
The growth, form, and division of prebiotic vesicles, membraneous bags of fluid of varying components and shapes is hypothesized to have served as the substrate for the origin of life. The dynamics of these out-of-equilibrium structures is…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
We study the small scale clustering of gyrotactic swimmers transported by a turbulent flow, when the intrinsic variability of the swimming parameters within the population is considered. By means of extensive numerical simulations, we find…
Many microorganisms take a chiral path while swimming in an ambient uid. In this paper, we study the combined behavior of two chiral swimmers using the well-known squirmer model taking into account chiral asymmetries. In contrast to the…
Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…
A big challenge in current biology is to understand the exact self-organization mechanism underlying complex multi-physics coupling developmental processes. With multiscale computations of from subcellular gene expressions to cell…
The effect of crowding on the run-and-tumble dynamics of swimmers such as bacteria is studied using a discrete lattice model of mutually excluding particles that move with constant velocity along a direction that is randomized at a rate…
Here, we study the evolution of specialization using realistic computer simulations of bacteria that secrete two public goods in a dynamic fluid. Through this first principles approach, we find physical factors such as diffusion, flow…
Diffusion rates through a membrane can be asymmetric, if the diffusing particles are spatially extended and the pores in the membrane have asymmetric structure. This phenomenon is demonstrated here via a deterministic simulation of a…
Some euglenids, a family of aquatic unicellular organisms, can develop highly concerted, large-amplitude peristaltic body deformations. This remarkable behaviour has been known for centuries. Yet, its function remains controversial, and is…
Motile eukaryotic cells propel themselves in viscous fluids by passing waves of bending deformation down their flagella. An infinitely long flagellum achieves a hydrodynamically optimal low-Reynolds number locomotion when the angle between…
Diversity indices are useful single-number metrics for characterizing a complex distribution of a set of attributes across a population of interest. The utility of these different metrics or sets of metrics depend on the context and…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
In vitro velocities of several cell types have been measured using computer controlled video microscopy, which allowed to record the cells' trajectories over several days. On the basis of our large data sets we show that the locomotion…
Many microorganisms swim by performing larger non-reciprocal shape deformations that are initiated locally by molecular motors. However, it remains unclear how decentralized shape control determines the movement of the entire organism.…
Swimming microbes, such as bacteria and algae, live in diverse habitats including soil, ocean and human body which are characterized by structural boundaries and heterogeneous fluid flows. Although much progress has been made in…
The twisting and writhing of a cell body and associated mechanical stresses is an underappreciated constraint on microbial self-propulsion. Multi-flagellated bacteria can even buckle and writhe under their own activity as they swim through…