Related papers: Bending Instability of Rod-shaped Bacteria
Take a drinking straw and bend it from its ends. After sufficient bending, the tube buckles forming a kink, where the curvature is localized in a very small area. This instability, known generally as the Brazier effect, is inherent to…
The elastocapillary instability of a flexible plate plunged in a liquid bath is analysed theoretically. We show that the plate can bend due to two separate destabilizing mechanisms, when the liquid is partially wetting the solid. For…
Everyday experience shows that cellular sheets are stiffened by the presence of a pressurized gas: from bicycle inner tubes to bubble wrap, the presence of an internal pressure increases the stiffness of otherwise floppy structures. The…
Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…
Rod-like bacteria maintain their cylindrical shapes with remarkable precision during growth. However, they are also capable to adapt their shapes to external forces and constraints, for example by growing into narrow or curved confinements.…
Hydrodynamics and confinement dominate bacterial mobility near solid or air-water boundaries, causing flagellated bacteria to move in circular trajectories. This phenomenon results from the counter-rotation between the bacterial body and…
We study intact and bulging Escherichia coli cells using atomic force microscopy to separate the contributions of the cell wall and turgor pressure to the overall cell stiffness. We find strong evidence of power-law stress-stiffening in the…
We study theoretically the shapes of biological tubes affected by various pathologies. When epithelial cells grow at an uncontrolled rate, the negative tension produced by their division provokes a buckling instability. Several shapes are…
A cylindrical elastomer tube can stay in an everted state without any applied external forces. If the thickness of the tube is small, the everted tube, except for the regions close to the two ends of the tube, is cylindrical, if the…
We demonstrate a novel shear-induced mechanism for growth of concentration fluctuations in a bacterial suspension. Using a linear stability analysis, a homogeneously sheared suspension is shown to support exponentially growing layering…
Bacterial cellulose is an important class of biomaterials which can be grown in well-controlled laboratory and industrial conditions. The cellulose structure is affected by several biological, chemical and environmental factors, including…
Motility is fundamental to the survival and proliferation of microorganisms. The E. coli bacterium propels itself using a bundle of rotating helical flagella. If one flagellum reverses its rotational direction, it leaves the bundle,…
We study the transport of bacteria in a porous media modeled by a square channel containing one cylindrical obstacle via molecular dynamics simulations coupled to a lattice Boltzmann fluid. Our bacteria model is a rod-shaped rigid body…
We demonstrate a facile and scalable technique, rotational freezing, to produce porous tubular ceramic supports with radially aligned porosity. The method is based on a conventional ice-templating process in a rotatory mold and demonstrated…
Induced by proteins within the cell membrane or by differential growth, heating, or swelling, spontaneous curvatures can drastically affect the morphology of thin bodies and induce mechanical instabilities. Yet, the interaction of…
Non-motile elongated bacteria confined in two-dimensional open micro-channels can exhibit collective motion and form dense monolayers with nematic order if the cells proliferate, i.e., grow and divide. Using soft molecular dynamics…
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…
We study the origins of multiple mechanically stable states exhibited by an elastic shell comprising multiple conical frusta, a geometry common to reconfigurable corrugated structures such as `bendy straws'. This multistability is…
Membrane deformation inside living cells is crucial for the proper shaping of various intracellular organelles and is necessary during the fission/fusion processes that allow membrane recycling and transport (e.g. endocytosis). Proteins…
When treated with antibiotics below the minimum inhibitory concentration, bacterial cell division turns off, but cell growth does not. Thus, rod-like bacteria, including E. coli, can elongate many times their length without increasing their…