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Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
Adaptation of the chemotaxis sensory pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli is integral for detecting chemicals over a wide range of background concentrations, ultimately allowing cells to swim towards sources of attractant and away from…
The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…
Individual Neurons in the nervous systems exploit various dynamics. To capture these dynamics for single neurons, we tune the parameters of an electrophysiological model of nerve cells, to fit experimental data obtained by calcium imaging.…
Viscosity is a key property of cell membranes that controls mobility of embedded proteins and membrane remodeling. Measuring it is challenging because existing approaches involve complex experimental designs and/or models, and the…
Swimming is ubiquitous in nature and crucial for the survival of a wide range of organisms. The physics of swimming at the viscosity-dominated microscale and inertia-dominated macroscale is well studied. However, in between lies a…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
It has long been known that some microswimmers seem to swim counter-intuitively faster when the viscosity of the surrounding fluid is increased, whereas others slow down. This conflicting dependence of the swimming velocity on the viscosity…
We derive from first principles a three-dimensional theory of self-propelled particle swarming in a viscous fluid environment. Our model predicts emergent collective behavior that depends critically on fluid opacity, mechanism of…
Microorganisms, such as bacteria and microalgae, often live in habitats consisting of a liquid phase and a plethora of interfaces. The precise ways in which these motile microbes behave in their confined environment remain unclear. Using…
Biological macromolecules have complex and non-trivial energy landscapes, endowing them a unique conformational adaptability and diversity in function. Hence, understanding the processes of elasticity and dissipation at the nanoscale is…
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…
Chemotaxis is the response of a particle to a gradient in the chemical composition of the environment. While it was originally observed for biological organisms, it is of great interest in the context of synthetic active particles such as…
Animals excel at adapting their intentions, attention, and actions to the environment, making them remarkably efficient at interacting with a rich, unpredictable and ever-changing external world, a property that intelligent machines…
Controlling the swimming behavior of bacteria is crucial, for example, to prevent contamination of ducts and catheters. We show the bacteria modeled by deformable microswimmers can accumulate in flows through straight microchannels either…
The creation of synthetic systems that emulate the defining properties of living matter, such as motility, gradient-sensing, signalling and replication, is a grand challenge of biomimetics. Such imitations of life crucially contain active…
Motivated by observations of the dynamics of {\it Myxococcus xanthus}, we present a self-interacting random walk model that describes the competition between chemokinesis and chemotaxis. Cells are constrained to move in one dimension, but…
Biological membranes constitute boundaries of cells and cell organelles. Physico-chemical mechanisms at the atomic scale are dictated by protein-lipid interaction strength, lipid composition, lipid distribution in the vicinity of the…
A major goal of modern computational biology is to simulate the collective behaviour of large cell populations starting from the intricate web of molecular interactions occurring at the microscopic level. In this paper we describe a…
Schooling, an archetype of collective behavior, emerges from the interactions of fish responding to visual and other informative cues mediated by their aqueous environment. In this context, a fundamental and largely unexplored question…