Related papers: Synchrony and symmetry-breaking in active flagella…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
To rotate continuously without jamming, the flagellar filaments of bacteria need to be locked in phase. While several models have been proposed for eukaryotic flagella, the synchronization of bacterial flagella is less well understood.…
Understanding how microorganisms navigate in complex environments is a central question in active matter and biological physics. Phototaxis - the ability to use light as a navigation cue - is a widespread strategy in motile microalgae to…
Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…
While hydrodynamic coupling has long been considered essential for synchronisation of eukaryotic flagella, recent experiments on the unicellular biflagellate model organism {\it Chlamydomonas} demonstrate that -- at the single cell level --…
Green algae of the $Volvocine$ lineage, spanning from unicellular $Chlamydomonas$ to vastly larger $Volvox$, are models for the study of the evolution of multicellularity, flagellar dynamics, and developmental processes. Phototactic…
Within biological fluid dynamics, it is conventional to distinguish between "puller" and "pusher" microswimmers on the basis of the forward or aft location of the flagella relative to the cell body: typically, bacteria are pushers and algae…
In bacterial chemotaxis, E. coli cells drift up chemical gradients by a series of runs and tumbles. Runs are periods of directed swimming, and tumbles are abrupt changes in swimming direction. Near the beginning of each run, the rotating…
Understanding the dynamical behavior of complex systems from their underlying network architectures is a long-standing question in complexity theory. Therefore, many metrics have been devised to extract network features like motifs,…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…
The quest for designing new self-propelled colloids is fuelled by the demand for simple experimental models to study the collective behaviour of their more complex natural counterparts. Most synthetic self-propelled particles move by…
Contact inhibition plays a crucial role in the motility of cells, the process of wound healing, and the formation of tumors. By mimicking the mechanical motion of calls crawling on a substrate using a pseudopod, we constructed a minimal…
Immune cells recognize and discriminate antigens through immunological synapses - dynamic intercellular junctions exhibiting highly organized receptor-ligand patterns. While much work has focused on molecular kinetics and passive mechanisms…
Although the auger-like 'swimming' motility of the African trypanosome was described upon its discovery over one hundred years ago, the precise biomechanical and biophysical properties of trypanosome flagellar motion has not been…
Chiral active particles, or self-propelled circle swimmers, from sperm cells to asymmetric Janus colloids, form a rich set of patterns, which are different from those seen in linear swimmers. Such patterns have mainly been explored for…
Many eukaryotic microorganisms propelled by multiple flagella can swim very rapidly with distinct gaits. Here, we model a three-dimensional mutiflagellate swimming strategy, resembling the microalgae, and investigate the effects of…
Multi-flagellated bacteria utilize the hydrodynamic interaction between their filamentary tails, known as flagella, to swim and change their swimming direction in low Reynolds number flow. This interaction, referred to as bundling and…
Many swimming microorganisms, such as bacteria and sperm, use flexible flagella to move through viscoelastic media in their natural environments. In this paper we address the effects a viscoelastic fluid has on the motion and beating…
Most motile bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments. These semi-rigid filaments repeatedly join ('bundle') and separate ('unbundle'), resulting in a two-gait random walk-like motion of the cell. In…
Structure formation and constant reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton are key requirements for the function of living cells. Here we show that a minimal reconstituted system consisting of actin filaments, crosslinking molecules and…