Related papers: Bacteria solve the problem of crowding by moving s…
The emergence of collective motion, also known as flocking or swarming, in groups of moving individuals who orient themselves using only information from their neighbors is a very general phenomenon that is manifested at multiple spatial…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
We have recorded the swarming-like collective migration of a large number of keratocytes (tissue cells obtained from the scales of goldfish) using long-term videomicroscopy. By increasing the overall density of the migrating cells, we have…
From biofilm and colony formation in bacteria to wound healing and embryonic development in multicellular organisms, groups of living cells must often move collectively. While considerable study has probed the biophysical mechanisms of how…
Hydrodynamics and confinement dominate bacterial mobility near solid or air-water boundaries, causing flagellated bacteria to move in circular trajectories. This phenomenon results from the counter-rotation between the bacterial body and…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
The effect of mechanical interactions between cells in the spreading of bacterial populations was investigated in one-dimensional space. A continuum-mechanics approach, comprising cell migration, proliferation, and exclusion processes, was…
Bacteria typically reside in heterogeneous environments with various chemogradients where motile cells can gain an advantage over non-motile cells. Since motility is energetically costly, cells must optimize their swimming speed and…
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…
Substrate-based cell motility is essential for fundamental biological processes, such as tissue growth, wound healing and immune response. Even if a comprehensive understanding of this motility mode remains elusive, progress has been…
Collective motion is a phenomenon observed across length scales in nature, from bacterial swarming and tissue migration to the flocking of animals. The mechanisms underlying this behavior vary significantly depending on the biological…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
Recent experiments (G. Ariel, et al., Nature Comm. 6, 8396 (2015)) revealed an intriguing behavior of swarming bacteria: they fundamentally change their collective motion from simple diffusion into a superdiffusive L\'{e}vy walk dynamics.…
In nature, bacterial collectives typically consist of multiple species, which are interacting both biochemically and physically. Nonetheless, past studies on the physical properties of swarming bacteria were focused on axenic (single…
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,…
Many mature bacterial colonies and biofilms are complex three-dimensional (3D) structures. One key step in their developmental program is a transition from a two-dimensional (2D) monolayer into a 3D architecture. Despite the importance of…
Prior to pioneer surface adhesion, bacteria have to navigate in flows, often in confined environments. While much is known about their individual swimming dynamics, our understanding of their transport properties at the population level…
Collective cell migration in epithelia relies on cell intercalation: a local remodelling of the cellular network that allows neighbouring cells to swap their positions. Unlike foams and passive cellular fluid, in epithelial intercalation…
Living materials such as biological tissues or bacterial colonies are collections of heterogeneous entities of different sizes, capable of autonomous motion, and often capable of cooperating. Such a degree of complexity brings to collective…
Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…