Related papers: Evolution of chemotactic hitchhiking
Micro-swimmers such as bacteria perform random walks known as run-and-tumbles to move up chemo-attractant gradients and as a result aggregate with others. It is also known that such micro-swimmers can self-organize into macroscopic patterns…
Through evolution, bacteria have developed the ability to perform chemotactic motion in order to find nourishment. By adopting a machine learning approach, we aim to understand how this behavior arises. We consider run-and-tumble agents…
We study the clustering of a model cyanobacterium \textit{Synechocystis} into microcolonies. The bacteria are allowed to diffuse onto surfaces of different hardness, and interact with the others by aggregation and detachment. We find that…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
One of simplest examples of navigation found in nature is run-and-tumble chemotaxis. Tumbles reorient cells randomly, and cells can drift toward attractants or away from repellents by biasing the frequency of these events. The post-tumble…
Chemotaxis and haptotaxis have been a main theme in the macroscopic study of bacterial and cellular motility. In this work we investigate the influence these processes have on the shape and motility of fast migrating cells. We note that…
The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…
Bacteria commonly inhabit porous environments such as host tissues, soil, and marine sediments, where complex geometries constrain and redirect their motion. Although bacterial motility has been studied in porous media, the roles of cell…
Escherichia coli is a motile bacterium that moves up a chemoattractant gradient by performing a biased random walk composed of alternating runs and tumbles. This paper presents calculations of the chemotactic drift velocity vd (the mean…
The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…
Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
Eukaryotic cell motility is crucial during development, wound healing, the immune response, and cancer metastasis. Some eukaryotic cells can swim, but cells more commonly adhere to and crawl along the extracellular matrix. We study the…
Understanding flow and transport of bacteria in porous media is crucial to technologies such as bioremediation, biomineralization or enhanced oil recovery. While physicochemical bacteria filtration is well-documented, recent studies showed…
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…
Motile cells often explore natural environments characterized by a high degree of structural complexity. Moreover cell motility is also intrinsically noisy due to spontaneous random reorientation and speed fluctuations. This interplay of…
Bacteria regulate their motility through a variety of mechanisms, including quorum sensing (QS) and other density-dependent responses mediated by diffusible signals. While nonlinear density-dependent motility is well known in active-matter…