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Active agents - like phoretic particles, bacteria, sperm, and cytoskeletal filaments in motility assays - show a large variety of motility-induced collective behaviors, such as aggregation, clustering and phase separation. The behavior of…
We numerically study the dynamics and the phases of self-propelled disk-shaped particles of different sizes with soft repulsive potential in two dimensions. Size diversity is introduced by the polydispersity index (PDI) $\epsilon$, which is…
A hallmark of bacterial populations cultured in vitro is their homogeneity of growth, where the majority of cells display identical growth rate, cell size and content. Recent insights, however, have revealed that even cells growing in…
Equations for dislocation evolution bridge the gap between dislocation properties and continuum descriptions of plastic behavior of crystalline materials. Computer simulations can help us verify these evolution equations and find their…
Polymer association at liquid-liquid interfaces is a promising way to spontaneously obtain soft self-healing membranes. In the case of reversible bonding between two polymers, the macromolecules are mobile everywhere within the membrane and…
Depletion forces and macromolecular crowding govern the structure and function of biopolymers in biological cells and the properties of polymer nanocomposite materials. To isolate and analyze the influence of polymer shape fluctuations and…
In this work we studied polymerization-induced self-assembly by means of computer simulations. Using this model, phase diagrams of the micelle states were constructed depending on the polymer concentration and the asymmetry of the…
Biofilms are a cluster of bacteria embedded in extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that contain a complex composition of polysaccharides, proteins, and extracellular DNA (eDNA). Desirable mechanical properties of the biofilms are…
Organisms across all domains of life regulate the size of their cells. However, the means by which this is done is poorly understood. We study two abstracted "molecular" models for size regulation: inhibitor dilution and initiator…
Capsids of many viruses assemble around nucleic acids or other polymers. Understanding how the properties of the packaged polymer affect the assembly process could promote biomedical efforts to prevent viral assembly or nanomaterials…
Microfiltration technology is a widely used engineering strategy for fresh water production and water treatment. The major concern in many applications is the formation of a biological fouling layer leading to increased hydraulic resistance…
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…
We study the surface growth generated by the random deposition of particles of different sizes. A model is proposed where the particles are aggregated on an initially flat surface, giving rise to a rough interface and a porous bulk. By…
We draw an analogy between droplet formation in dilute particle and polymer systems. Our arguments are based on finite-size scaling results from studies of a two-dimensional lattice gas to three-dimensional bead-spring polymers. To set the…
We study the surface diffusion of the model cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC $6803$ during the incipient stages of cell contact with a glass surface in the dilute regime. We observe a twitching motility with alternating immobile…
We derive a physiologically structured multiscale model for biofilm development. The model has components on two spatial scales, which induce different time scales into the problem. The macroscopic behavior of the system is modeled using…
We present some results of Monte Carlo simulations for the deposition of particles of different sizes on a two-dimensional substrate. The particles are linear, height one, and can be deposited randomly only in the two, $x$ and $y$…
A hydrodynamic model is proposed to describe one of the most critical problems in intensive medical care units: the formation of biofilms inside central venous catheters. The incorporation of approximate solutions for the flow-limited…
In this paper, we derive upscaled equations for modelling biofilm growth in porous media. The resulting macro-scale mathematical models consider permeable multi-species biofilm including water flow, transport, detachment and reactions. The…
We develop a numerical framework to simulate the locomotion of a flagellated bacterium with a spheroidal head (such as Escherichia coli) in biological fluids like mucus, which are entangled polymer solutions exhibiting elasto-viscoplastic…