Related papers: Bending Instability of Rod-shaped Bacteria
When a ribbon or tube is twisted far enough it forms buckles and wrinkles. Its new geometry can be strikingly ordered, or hopelessly disordered. Here we study this process in a tube with hybrid boundary conditions: one end a cylinder, and…
Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
In the past fifteen years, flow instabilities reminiscent of the Taylor-like instabilities driven by hoop stresses, have been observed in wormlike micelles based on surfactant molecules. In particular, purely elastic instabilities and…
Crohn's disease is an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that is not well understood. In particular, unlike other IBDs, the inflamed parts of the intestine compromise deep layers of the tissue and are not continuous but separated and…
Fluids with internal microstructure like dense suspensions, biological and polymer added fluids, are commonly found in the turbulent regime in many applications. Their flow is extremely difficult to be studied as microstructure complexity…
The distributions of many proteins in rod-shaped bacteria are far from homogenous. Often they accumulate at the cell poles or in the cell center. At the same time, the copy number of proteins in a single cell is relatively small making the…
Bistability is considered wide-spread among bacteria and eukaryotic cells, useful e.g. for enzyme induction, bet hedging, and epigenetic switching. However, this phenomenon has mostly been described with deterministic dynamic or well-mixed…
The motility mechanism of certain rod-shaped bacteria has long been a mystery, since no external appendages are involved in their motion which is known as gliding. However, the physical principles behind gliding motility still remain poorly…
Motivated by recent experiments on the rod-like virus bacteriophage fd, confined to circular and annular domains, we present a theoretical study of structural transitions in these geometries. Using the continuum theory of nematic liquid…
In many situations bacteria move in complex environments, as for example in soils, oceans or the human gut-track microbiome. In these natural environments, carrier fluids such as mucus or reproductive fluids show complex structure…
Fluidization of solid particles by an ascending fluid is frequent in industry because of the high rates of mass and heat transfers achieved. However, in some cases blockages occur and hinder the correct functioning of the fluidized bed. In…
Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…
Rotational superradiance was predicted theoretically decades ago, and is chiefly responsible for a number of important effects and phenomenology in black-hole physics. However, rotational superradiance has never been observed…
Engineered bacteria in which motility is reduced by local cell density generate periodic stripes of high and low density when spotted on agar plates. We study theoretically the origin and mechanism of this process in a kinetic model that…
Starting from the hypothesis that the tubulin dimer is a conformationally bistable molecule - fluctuating between a curved and a straight configuration at room temperature - we develop a model for polymorphic dynamics of the microtubule…
A fluidized bed is basically a suspension of granular material by an ascending fluid in a tube, and it has a rich dynamics that includes clustering and pattern formation. When the ratio between the tube and grain diameters is small,…
Previous linear bifurcation analyses have evidenced that an axially stretched soft cylindrical tube may develop an infinite-wavelength (localised) instability when one or both of its lateral surfaces are under sufficient surface tension.…
Drying of bacterial suspensions is frequently encountered in a plethora of natural and engineering processes. However, the evaporation-driven mechanical instabilities of dense consolidating bacterial suspensions have not been explored…
We develop a mean-field model to examine the stability of a `quasi-2D suspension' of elongated particles embedded within a viscous membrane. This geometry represents several biological and synthetic settings, and we reveal mechanisms by…
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low…