Related papers: Swimming Euglena respond to confinement with a beh…

Several micro-organisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, use flagella or cilia to swim in a fluid, while many other micro-organisms instead use ample shape deformation, described as amoeboid, to propel themselves by either crawling…

Eukaryotic swimming cells such as spermatozoa, algae or protozoa use flagella or cilia to move in viscous fluids. The motion of their flexible appendages in the surrounding fluid induces propulsive forces that balance with the viscous drag…

Geometric confinement plays an important role in the dynamics of natural and synthetic microswimmers from bacterial cells to self-propelled particles in high-throughput microfluidic devices. However, little is known about the effects of…

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…

Living creatures exhibit a remarkable diversity of locomotion mechanisms, evolving structures specialised for interacting with their environment. In the vast majority of cases, locomotor behaviours such as flying, crawling, and running, are…

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…

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…

Bacteria exist in a free-swimming state or in a sessile biofilm state. The transition from free-swimming to sessile mode is characterized by changes in gene expression which alter, among others,the mechanics of flagellar motility. In this…

Biological microswimmers, like euglena, deform their body shape to swim through tight confinements having length scales comparable to the microswimmer length scale. Recently, it was shown that self-propelling active droplets can also…

Active matter comprises individually driven units that convert locally stored energy into mechanical motion. Interactions between driven units lead to a variety of non-equilibrium collective phenomena in active matter. One of such phenomena…

Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…

We study the velocity distribution of unicellular swimming algae Euglena gracilis using optical microscopy and theory. To characterize a peculiar feature of the experimentally observed distribution at small velocities we use the concept of…

Dense suspensions of swimming bacteria are known to exhibit collective behaviour arising from the interplay of steric and hydrodynamic interactions. Unconfined suspensions exhibit transient, recurring vortices and jets, whereas those…

Many eukaryotic cells undergo frequent shape changes (described as amoeboid motion) that enable them to move forward. We investigate the effect of confinement on a minimal model of amoeboid swimmer. Complex pictures emerge: (i) The…

A flagellated bacterium navigates fluid environments by rotating its helical flagellar bundle. The wobbling of the bacterial body significantly influences its swimming behavior. To quantify the three underlying motions--precession,…

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…

Single flagellated bacteria are ubiquitous in nature. They exhibit various swimming modes using their flagella to explore complex surroundings such as soil and porous polymer networks. Some single-flagellated bacteria swim with two distinct…

The motility of microorganisms is influenced greatly by their hydrodynamic interactions with the fluidic environment they inhabit. We show by direct experimental observation of the bi-flagellated alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that fluid…

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"…

Bacterial colonies are a well-known example of living active matter, exhibiting collective behaviors such as nematic alignment and collective motion that play an important role in the spread of microbial infections. While the underlying…