Related papers: Dynamic stiffening of the flagellar hook
Centrifugation is a widespread laboratory technique used to separate mixtures into fractions characterized by a specific size, weight or density. We demonstrate that centrifugation can be also used to separate swimming cells having…
An analytical model based on variational principles for a thin-walled stiffened plate subjected to axial compression is presented. A system of nonlinear differential and integral equations is derived and solved using numerical continuation.…
Many biological microorganisms and artificial microswimmers react to external cues of environmental gradients by changing their swimming directions. We study here the behavior of eukarytic flagellated microswimmers in linear viscosity…
Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…
The propulsion of many eukaryotic cells is generated by flagella, flexible slender filaments that are actively oscillating in space and time. The dynamics of these biological appendages have inspired the design of many types of artificial…
We present experiments demonstrating tube formation in giant unilamellar vesicles that are suspended in a bath of swimming E. coli bacteria. We chose the lipids such that the bacteria have no adhereing interaction with the membrane. The…
Bacterial flagellar motor is one of the most complex and sophisticated nano machineries in nature. A duty ratio $D$ is a fraction of time that the stator and the rotor interact and is a fundamental property to characterize the motor but…
Rotation of a single bacterial flagellar motor is powered by multiple stators tethered to the cell wall. In a "power-stroke" model the observed independence of the speed at low load on the number of stators is explained by a…
Biopolymers are vital structures for many living organisms; for a variety of bacteria, adhesion polymers play a crucial role for the initiation of colonization. Some bacteria express, on their surface, attachment organelles (pili) that…
We have used numerical simulations to investigate how the properties of motor proteins control the dynamical behavior of a driven flexible filament. The filament is pinned at one end and positioned on top of a patch of anchored motor…
We investigate the motion of a flexible Stokesean flagellar swimmer realised as a yarn made of two intertwined elastomer fibres, one active, that can reversibly change its length in response to a local excitation causing transition to the…
The quest for designing new self-propelled colloids is fuelled by the demand for simple experimental models to study the collective behaviour of their more complex natural counterparts. Most synthetic self-propelled particles move by…
Synchronization of actively oscillating organelles such as cilia and flagella facilitates self-propulsion of cells and pumping fluid in low Reynolds number environments. To understand the key mechanism behind synchronization induced by…
Self-propelling bacteria are a dream of nano-technology. These unicellular organisms are not just capable of living and reproducing, but they can swim very efficiently, sense the environment and look for food, all packaged in a body…
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…
We discuss a two-dimensional model for the dynamics of axonemal deformations driven by internally generated forces of molecular motors. Our model consists of an elastic filament pair connected by active elements. We derive the dynamic…
The presence of a nearby boundary is likely to be important in the life cycle and evolution of motile flagellate bacteria. This has led many authors to employ numerical simulations to model near-surface bacterial motion and compute…
Oscillations of flagella and cilia play an important role in biology, which motivates the idea of functional mimicry as part of bio-inspired applications. Nevertheless, it still remains challenging to drive their artificial counterparts to…
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…
The behavior of flagellated bacteria swimming in non-Newtonian media remains an area with contradictory and conflicting results. We report on the behavior of wild-type and smooth-swimming E. coli in Newtonian, shear thinning and…