Related papers: Analysis and Simulation of a Novel Run-and-Tumble …
Many motile cells exhibit migratory behaviors, such as chemotaxis (motion up or down a chemical gradient) or chemokinesis (when speed depends on concentration), which enable them to carry out vital functions including immune response, egg…
Intelligent decisions in response to external informative input can allow organisms to achieve their biological goals while spending very little of their own resources. In this paper, we develop and study a minimal model for a navigational…
Biological membranes are host to proteins and molecules which may form domain-like structures resulting in spatially-varying material properties. Vesicles with such heterogeneous membranes can exhibit intricate shapes at equilibrium and…
Recent advances in microscopy techniques has uncovered unique aspects of flagella-driven motility in bacteria. A remarkable example is the discovery of flagellar wrapping, a phenomenon whereby a bacterium wraps its flagellum (or flagellar…
Experiments have recently shown the feasibility of utilising bacteria as micro-scale robotic devices, with special attention paid to the development of bacteria-driven micro-swimmers taking advantage of built-in actuation and sensing…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
The random energy landscapes developed by speckle fields can be used to confine and manipulate a large number of micro-particles with a single laser beam. By means of molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the static and dynamic…
Active particles with their characteristic feature of self-propulsion are regarded as the simplest models for motility in living systems. The accumulation of active particles in low activity regions has led to the general belief that…
Many living and physical systems such as cell aggregates, tissues or bacterial colonies behave as unconventional systems of particles that are strongly constrained by volume exclusion and shape interactions. Understanding how these…
The present habilitation thesis in theoretical biological physics addresses two central dynamical processes in cells and organisms: (i) active motility and motility control and (ii) self-organized pattern formation. The unifying theme is…
Plankton dynamics depend in a complex manner on a variety of physical phenomena, according to both experimental and numerical data. In particular, experimental field studies have highlighted the relation between phytoplankton survival and…
Experiments have shown that self-propelled particles can slide along the surface of a circular obstacle without becoming trapped over long times. Using simulations and theory, we study the impact of boundary conditions on the diffusive…
Active walker models have recently proved their great value for describing the formation of clusters, periodic patterns, and spiral waves as well as the development of rivers, dielectric breakdown patterns, and many other structures. It is…
The design of artificial microswimmers has generated significant research interest in recent years, for promise in applications such as nanomotors and targeted drug-delivery. However, many current designs suffer from a common problem,…
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…
Many biological microorganisms and artificial microswimmers react to external cues of environmental gradients by changing their swimming directions. We study here the behavior of eukarytic flagellated microswimmers in linear viscosity…
We consider self-propelled particles undergoing run-and-tumble dynamics (as exhibited by E. coli) in one dimension. Building on previous analyses at drift-diffusion level for the one-particle density, we add both interactions and noise,…
In this paper homogenization of a mathematical model for plant tissue biomechanics is presented. The microscopic model constitutes a strongly coupled system of reaction-diffusion-convection equations for chemical processes in plant cells,…
In the hierarchical structure formation model cosmic halos are supposed to form by accretion of smaller units along anisotropic direction, defined by large-scale filamentary structures. After the epoch of primary mass aggregation (which…
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…