Related papers: Geometric effects induce anomalous size-dependent …
Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
When the motion of a motile cell is observed closely, it appears erratic, and yet the combination of nonequilibrium forces and surfaces can produce striking examples of organization in microbial systems. While most of our current…
During colony growth, complex interactions regulate the bacterial orientation, leading to the formation of large-scale ordered structures, including topological defects and microdomains. These structures may benefit bacterial strains,…
We study non-equilibrium bacterial colony growth using a geometry-first, time-resolved analysis of morphology. From time-lapse microscopy data, we track the coupled evolution of area, perimeter, and boundary-sensitive shape descriptors…
We show how the nonlinear interaction effects `volume filling' and `adhesion' can be incorporated into the fractional subdiffusive transport of cells and individual organisms. To this end, we use microscopic random walk models with…
Several experiments have demonstrated the existence of an electro-mechanical effect in many biological tissues and hydrogels, and its actual influence on growth, migration, and pattern formation. Here, to model these interactions and…
We theoretically study the transport properties of self-propelled particles on complex structures, such as motor proteins on filament networks. A general master equation formalism is developed to investigate the persistent motion of…
Recent experiments reveal both passive subdiffusion of various nanoparticles and anomalous active transport of such particles by molecular motors in the molecularly crowded environment of living biological cells. Passive and active…
Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…
We study transport in synthetic, bi-disperse porous structures, with arrays of microchannels interconnected by a nanoporous layer. These structures are inspired by the xylem tissue in vascular plants, in which sap water travels from the…
We study the transport of bacteria in a porous media modeled by a square channel containing one cylindrical obstacle via molecular dynamics simulations coupled to a lattice Boltzmann fluid. Our bacteria model is a rod-shaped rigid body…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
Swimming microbes, such as bacteria and algae, live in diverse habitats including soil, ocean and human body which are characterized by structural boundaries and heterogeneous fluid flows. Although much progress has been made in…
The large-scale collective behavior of biological systems can be characterized by macroscopic transport, which arises from the non-equilibrium microscopic interactions among individual constituents. A prominent example is the formation of…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
Run-and-tumble is a common but vital strategy that bacteria employ to explore environment suffused with boundaries, as well as to escape from entrapment. In this study we reveal how this strategy and the resulting dynamical behavior can be…
Transport of rodlike particles in confinement environments of macromolecular networks plays crucial roles in many important biological processes and technological applications. The relevant understanding has been limited to thin rods with…
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…
Intracellular components explore the cytoplasm via active motor-driven transport in conjunction with passive diffusion. We model the motion of organelles in narrow tubular cells using analytical techniques and numerical simulations to study…