Related papers: Cellular memory enhances bacterial chemotactic nav…
Many motile biological cells navigate along concentration gradients of signaling molecules: This chemotaxis guides for instance sperm cells from marine invertebrates, which have to find egg cells in the ocean. While chemotaxis has been…
Living cells are capable of interacting with their environments in a variety of ways, including cell signalling, adhesion, and directed motion. These behaviours are often mediated by receptor molecules embedded in the cell membrane, which…
We investigate the boundary between chemotaxis driven by spatial estimation of gradients and chemotaxis driven by temporal estimation. While it is well known that spatial chemotaxis becomes disadvantageous for small organisms at high noise…
Many motile microorganisms react to environmental light cues with a variety of motility responses guiding cells towards better conditions for survival and growth. The use of spatial light modulators could help to elucidate the mechanisms of…
The Keller-Segel system has been widely proposed as a model for bacterial waves driven by chemotactic processes. Current experiments on {\em E. coli} have shown precise structure of traveling pulses. We present here an alternative…
Adaptive response to a varying environment is a common feature of biological organisms. Reproducing such features in electronic systems and circuits is of great importance for a variety of applications. Here, we consider memory models…
Understanding how the physical properties of a fluid influence bacterial behavior is essential for explaining how microorganisms interact with their environment and with animal hosts. Here, we examine how changes in fluid viscosity and…
Conjugation accelerates bacterial evolution by enabling bacteria to acquire genes horizontally from their neighbors. Plasmid donors must physically encounter and connect with recipients to allow plasmid transfer, and different environments…
Experiments have recently shown the feasibility of utilising bacteria as micro-scale robotic devices, with special attention paid to the development of bacteria-driven micro-swimmers taking advantage of built-in actuation and sensing…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
The flagellated bacterium Escherichia coli is increasingly used experimentally as a self-propelled swimmer. To obtain meaningful, quantitative results that are comparable between different laboratories, reproducible protocols are needed to…
Bacteria seem masters of chemotaxis, yet recent work suggests otherwise. Henry Mattingly and colleagues (Nature Physics, 2026) argue that Escherichia coli uses only a small fraction of the sensory information available at its surface,…
The chemotactic pathway allows bacteria to respond and adapt to environmental changes, by tuning the tumbling and running motions that are due to clockwise and counterclockwise rotations of their flagella. The pathway is tightly regulated…
Response time-delay is an ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. Here we use a simple stochastic population model with time-delayed switching-rate conversion to quantitatively study the biological influence of the response time-delay…
We recently found that marine bacteria Vibrio alginolyticus execute a cyclic 3-step (run- reverse-flick) motility pattern that is distinctively different from the 2-step (run-tumble) pattern of Escherichia coli. How this novel swimming…
Bacteria are able to respond to environmental signals by changing their rules of movement. When we take into account chemical signals in the environment, this behaviour is often called chemotaxis. At the individual-level, chemotaxis…
We explore how different types and uses of memory can aid spatial navigation in changing uncertain environments. In the simple foraging task we study, every day, our agent has to find its way from its home, through barriers, to food.…
Motivated by observations of the dynamics of {\it Myxococcus xanthus}, we present a self-interacting random walk model that describes the competition between chemokinesis and chemotaxis. Cells are constrained to move in one dimension, but…
A large number of biological systems - from bacteria to sheep - can be described as ensembles of self-propelled agents (active particles) with a complex internal dynamic that controls the agent's behavior: resting, moving slow, moving fast,…
The Keller-Segel model is a system of partial differential equations modelling chemotactic aggregation in cellular systems. This model has blowing up solutions for large enough initial conditions in dimensions d >= 2, but all the solutions…