Related papers: Confinement and activity regulate bacterial motion…
Understanding the motion of particles with ligand-receptors is important for biomedical applications and material design. Yet, even among a single design, the prototypical DNA-coated colloids, seemingly similar micrometric particles hop or…
Escherichia coli and other bacteria use rotating helical filaments to swim. Each cell typically has about four filaments, which bundle or disperse depending on the sense of motor rotation. To study the bundling process, we built a…
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…
Active particles such as swimming bacteria or self-propelled colloids are known to spontaneously organize into fascinating large-scale dynamic structures. The emergence of these collective states from the motility pattern of the individual…
Variations of transport efficiency in structured environments between distinct individuals in actively self-propelled systems is both hard to study and poorly understood. Here, we study the transport of a non-tumbling {\ecoli} strain, an…
Fluid stretching in porous media governs the mixing of reactants, contaminants, and nutrients, yet how the solid microstructure controls the stretching statistics remains poorly understood. We investigate how porous-medium heterogeneity…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
Two models involving particles moving by ``hopping'' in disordered media are investigated: I) A model glass-forming liquid is investigated by molecular dynamics under (pseudo-) equilibrium conditions. ``Standard'' results such as mean…
In natural environments, solid surfaces present both opportunities and challenges for bacteria. On one hand, they serve as platforms for biofilm formation, crucial for bacterial colonization and resilience in harsh conditions. On the other…
The transport of active particles may occur in complex environments, in which it emerges from the interplay between the mobility of the active components and the quenched disorder of the environment. Here we explore structural and dynamical…
Controlling the phases of matter is a challenge that spans from condensed materials to biological systems. Here, by imposing a geometric boundary condition, we study controlled collective motion of Escherichia coli bacteria. A circular…
We confine a dense suspension of motile \textit{Escherichia coli} inside a spherical droplet in a water-in-oil emulsion, creating a "bacterially" propelled droplet. We show that droplets move in a persistent random walk, with a persistence…
Interaction between active materials and the boundaries of geometrical confinement is key to many emergent phenomena in active systems. For living active matter consisting of animal cells or motile bacteria, the confinement boundary is…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
A theoretical calculation is presented to describe the confined motion of transmembrane molecules in cell membranes. The study is analytic, based on Master equations for the probability of the molecules moving as random walkers, and leads…
The dynamics of colloidal suspension confined within porous materials strongly differs from that in the bulk. In particular, within porous materials, the presence of boundaries with complex shapes entangles the longitudinal and transverse…
Microbiology is the science of microbes, particularly bacteria. Many bacteria are motile: they are capable of self-propulsion. Among these, a significant class execute so-called run-and-tumble motion: they follow a fairly straight path for…
The field of active matter explores the behaviors of self propelled agents out of equilibrium, with active suspensions, such as swimming bacteria in solutions, serving as impactful models. These systems exhibit spatio-temporal patterns akin…