Related papers: Geometric effects induce anomalous size-dependent …
Recent biological experiments have shown that certain types of cells are able to move in structured and confined environment even without the activation of focal adhesion. Focusing on this particular phenomenon and based on previous works,…
We propose a new type of traveling wave pattern, one that can adapt to the size of physical system in which it is embedded. Such a system arises when the initial state has an instability that extends down to zero wavevector, connecting at…
We investigate active particles that exhibit long-range interactions only restricted by a field of view, which is characterized by an angle $\beta$. We show that constraining attractive interactions to a field of view leads to the emergence…
Order and alignment are ubiquitous in growing colonies of rod-shaped bacteria due to the nematic properties of the constituent particles. These effects are the result of the active stresses generated by growth, passive mechanical…
Transport properties of particles in confining geometries show very specific characteristics as lateral drift, oscillatory movement between lateral walls or the deformation of flexible fibers. These dynamics result from viscous friction…
Anomalous diffusion or, more generally, anomalous transport, with nonlinear dependence of the mean-squared displacement on the measurement time, is ubiquitous in nature. It has been observed in processes ranging from microscopic movement of…
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
Natural habitats of most living microorganisms are distinguished by a complex structure often formed by a porous medium such as soil. The dynamics and transport properties of motile microorganisms are strongly affected by crowded and…
Biological systems are majorly dependent on their property of bistability in order to exhibit nongenetic heterogeneity in terms of cellular morphology and physiology. Spatial patterns of phenotypically heterogeneous cells, arising due to…
In densely-packed two-dimensional systems of growing cells, such as rod-shaped bacteria, a number of experimental and numerical studies report distinct patterns of nematic orientational order in the presence of confinement. So far, these…
We study colonies of non-motile, rod-shaped bacteria growing on solid substrates. In our model, bacteria interact purely mechanically, by pushing each other away as they grow, and consume a diffusing nutrient. We show that mechanical…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
Recent experiments have illuminated a remarkable growth mechanism of rod-shaped bacteria: proteins associated with cell wall extension move at constant velocity in circles oriented approximately along the cell circumference (Garner et al.,…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
Eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens such as bacteria or viruses utilize the actin polymerization machinery to propel themselves forward. Thereby, the onset of motion and choice of direction may be the result of a spontaneous…
Randomly moving active particles can be herded into directed motion by asymmetric geometric structures. Although such a rectification process has been extensively studied due to its fundamental, biological, and technological relevance, a…
Applying mechanical perturbations in a granular assembly may rearrange the configuration of the particles. However, the spatial propagation of an event is not related to the size of the external perturbation alone. Thus, the characteristic…
We investigate the transport of interacting active run-and-tumble particles moving under an external drift force through a periodic array of obstacles for increasing drive amplitudes. For high activity where the system forms a motility…
Transport across heterogeneous, patchy environments is a ubiquitous phenomenon spanning fields of study including ecological movement, intracellular transport and regions of specialised function in a cell. These regions or patches may be…
The striking variety of macroscopic morphologies displayed by bacterial colonies depends on microscopic environmental and behavioural details in a manner that is currently not well understood. A surprising example is sibling inhibition,…