Related papers: Ciliary beating patterns map onto a low-dimensiona…
Many microorganisms propel through complex media by deformations of their flagella. The beat is thought to emerge from interactions between forces of the surrounding fluid, passive elastic response from deformations of the flagellum, and…
Cilia and flagella are micron-sized filaments that actively beat with remarkable precision in a viscous medium, driving microorganism movement and efficient flow. We study the rower model to uncover how cilia activity and dissipation enable…
Cilia and flagella exhibit regular bending waves that perform mechanical work on the surrounding fluid, to propel cellular swimmers and pump fluids inside organisms. Here, we quantify a force-velocity relationship of the beating flagellum,…
Flagella and cilia are cellular appendages that inherit essential functions of microbial life including sensing and navigating the environment. In order to propel a swimming microorganism they displace the surrounding fluid by means of…
Eukaryotic flagella are active structures with a complex architecture of microtubules, motor proteins and elastic links. They are capable of whiplike motions driven by motors sliding along filaments that are themselves constrained at an…
We combine technical, experimental and theoretical efforts to investigate the collective dynamics of artificial microcilia in a viscous fluid. We take advantage of soft-lithography and colloidal self-assembly to devise microcapets made of…
Many biological microswimmers can modulate their swimming gait to achieve directional control of motility, especially when performing steering towards specific directional cues. This can be achieved without the need for obvious…
Cellular appendages conferring motility, such as flagella or cilia, are known to synchronise their periodic beats. The origin of synchronisation is a combination of long-range hydrodynamic interactions with physical mechanisms allowing the…
Filamentous cyanobacteria, forming long strands of connected cells, are one of the earliest and most successful forms of life on Earth. They exhibit self-organised behaviour, forming large-scale patterns in structures like biomats and…
Active particles (living or synthetic) often move through inhomogeneous environments, such as gradients in light, heat or nutrient concentration, that can lead to directed motion (or taxis). Recent research has explored inhomogeneity in the…
The slime mould Physarum polycephalum has emerged as a model for self-organisation and coordination of contractile activity at large spatial scales. This self-organisation largely results from cytoplasmic flows generated by propagating…
Swimming microorganisms can influence the diffusion of passive particles. The effect of this swimmer-particle interaction depends on different properties, such as the hydrodynamic field of the swimmer and the relative sizes of…
It has been shown that self-assembled chains of active colloidal particles can present sustained oscillations. These oscillations are possible because of the effective diffusiophoretic forces that mediate the interactions of colloids do not…
Suspensions of motile microorganisms can spontaneously form large-scale fluid motion, known as bioconvection, characterized by dense downwelling plumes separated by broad upwelling regions. In this study, we investigate bioconvection in…
In this fluid dynamics video, we demonstrate the microscale mixing enhancement of passive tracer particles in suspensions of swimming microalgae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. These biflagellated, single-celled eukaryotes (10 micron diameter)…
Groups of beating flagella or cilia often synchronize so that neighboring filaments have identical frequencies and phases. A prime example is provided by the unicellular biflagellate Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which typically displays…
To mimic the mechanical response of passive biological cilia in complex fluids, we study the bending dynamics of an anchored elastic fiber submitted to a dilute granular suspension under shear. We show that the bending fluctuations of the…
Most bacteria are driven by the cilia or flagella, consisting of a long filament and a rotary molecular motor through a short flexible hook. The beating pattern of these filaments shows synchronization properties from hydrodynamic…
Motile cilia drive biological fluid transport through whip-like beating motions that synchronize into metachronal waves. The lengths of these cilia span three orders of magnitude, from microns in human airways to millimeters in ctenophores.…
Micro-organisms propel themselves in viscous environments by the periodic, nonreciprocal beating of slender appendages known as flagella. Active materials have been widely exploited to mimic this form of locomotion. However, the realization…