Related papers: Cellular memory enhances bacterial chemotactic nav…
A wide spectrum of Peritrichous bacteria undergo considerable physiological changes when they are inoculated onto nutrition-rich surfaces and exhibit a rapid and collective migration denoted as swarming. Thereby, the length of such swarmer…
Controlling bacterial surface adhesion and subsequent biofilm formation in fluid systems is crucial for the safety and efficacy of medical and industrial processes. Here, we theoretically examine the transport of bacteria close to surfaces,…
In vivo, eukaryotic cells are embedded in a matrix environment, where they grow and develop. Generally, this extracellular matrix (ECM) is an anisotropic fibrous structure, through which macromolecules and biochemical signaling molecules at…
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"…
Chemotaxis is a fundamental mechanism of cells and organisms, which is responsible for attracting microbes to food, embryonic cells into developing tissues, or immune cells to infection sites. Mathematically chemotaxis is described by the…
A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…
Cells rely on the ability to sense and respond to small spatial differences in chemoattractant concentrations for survival. There is growing evidence that this is accomplished by setting the signaling system near the threshold for…
Spatial heterogeneity is a hallmark of living systems, even at the molecular scale in individual cells. A key example is the partitioning of membrane-bound proteins via lipid domain formation or cytoskeleton-induced corralling. Yet the…
Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
Animal cells can sense chemical gradients without moving, and are faced with the challenge of migrating towards a target despite noisy information on the target position. Here we discuss optimal search strategies for a chaser that moves by…
Active fluids made of powered suspended particles have unique abilities to self-generate flow and density structures. How such dynamics can be triggered and leveraged by external cues is a key question of both biological and applied…
Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…
E. coli chemotactic motion in the presence of a chemoattractant field has been extensively studied using wet laboratory experiments, stochastic computational models as well as partial differential equation-based models (PDEs). The most…
We formulate the Smoluchowski equation for a run-and-tumble particle. It includes the mean tumble rate in a chemical field, for which we derive a Markovian response theory. Using a multipole expansion and a reaction-diffusion equation for…
Inhomogeneities in the velocity field of a moving fluid are dampened by the inherent viscous behaviour of the system. Both bulk and shear effects, related to the divergence and the curl of the velocity field, are relevant. On molecular time…
Kinetic-transport equations are, by now, standard models to describe the dynamics of populations of bacteria moving by run-and-tumble. Experimental observations show that bacteria increase their run duration when encountering an increasing…
In many sensory systems, transmembrane receptors are spatially organized in large clusters. Such arrangement may facilitate signal amplification and the integration of multiple stimuli. However, this organization likely also affects the…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
During the past century, biologists and mathematicians investigated two mechanisms underlying bacteria motion: the run phase during which bacteria move in straight lines and the tumble phase in which they change their orientation. When…