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Related papers: Active transport in complex environments

200 papers

Traffic-like collective movements are observed at almost all levels of biological systems. Molecular motor proteins like, for example, kinesin and dynein, which are the vehicles of almost all intra-cellular transport in eukayotic cells,…

Biological Physics · Physics 2008-01-16 Debashish Chowdhury , Andreas Schadschneider , Katsuhiro Nishinari

Biological functionality of cellular aggregates is largely influenced by the activity and displacements of individual constituent cells. From a theoretical perspective this activity can be characterized by hydrodynamic transport…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-07-31 Subhadip Chakraborti , Vasily Zaburdaev

Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-05-18 Sriram Ramaswamy

Biological active materials such as bacterial biofilms and eukaryotic cells thrive in confined micro-spaces. Here, we show through numerical simulations that confinement can serve as a mechanical guidance to achieve distinct modes of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-08-05 Felix Kempf , Romain Mueller , Erwin Frey , Julia M. Yeomans , Amin Doostmohammadi

Many natural and industrial processes rely on constrained transport, such as proteins moving through cells, particles confined in nanocomposite materials or gels, individuals in highly dense collec- tives and vehicular traffic conditions.…

Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers, that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices. These processes are possible thanks to the out-of-equilibrium…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-11-17 Jens Grauer , Falko Schmidt , Jesus Pineda , Benjamin Midtvedt , Hartmut Löwen , Giovanni Volpe , Benno Liebchen

Biological systems exhibit large-scale self-organized dynamics and structures which enable organisms to perform the functions of life. The field of active matter strives to develop and understand microscopically-driven nonequilibrium…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-02-11 Michael F. Hagan , Aparna Baskaran

Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-01 Mattia Mattei , David Soriano Paños , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Alex Arenas

Active systems across scales, ranging from molecular machines to human crowds, are usually modeled as assemblies of self-propelled particles driven by internally generated forces. However, these models often assume memoryless dynamics and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-12-10 Marc Besse , Raphaël Voituriez

The present article is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). It is a review of the biophysical mechanisms that underly cell motility. It mainly focuses…

Biological Physics · Physics 2011-09-22 Thomas Risler

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…

Biological Physics · Physics 2019-09-12 Stanislaw Makarchuk , Vasco C. Braz , Nuno A. M. Araújo , Lena Ciric , Giorgio Volpe

We demonstrate that active carpets of bacteria or self-propelled colloids generate coherent flows towards the substrate, and propose that these currents provide efficient pathways to replenish nutrients that feed back into activity. A full…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-12-19 Arnold J. T. M. Mathijssen , Francisca Guzmán-Lastra , Andreas Kaiser , Hartmut Löwen

Intracellular transport of vesicular cargos, organelles, and other macromolecules is an essential process to move large items through a crowded, and inhomogeneous cellular environment. In an effort to dissect the fundamental effects of…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2014-09-12 Leslie Conway , Jennifer L. Ross

The large-scale collective behavior of biological systems can be characterized by macroscopic transport, which arises from the non-equilibrium microscopic interactions among individual constituents. A prominent example is the formation of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-07-29 Subhadip Chakraborti , Vasily Zaburdaev

We numerically examine the transport of active run-and-tumble particles driven with a drift force over random disordered landscapes comprised of fixed obstacles. For increasing run lengths, the net particle transport initially increases…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2017-12-06 C. Reichhardt , C. J. Olson Reichhardt

Membranes regulate transport in a wide variety of industrial and biological applications. The microscale geometry of the membrane can significantly affect overall transport through the membrane, but the precise nature of this multiscale…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-02-02 Molly Brennan , Edwina F. Yeo , Philip Pearce , Mohit P. Dalwadi

We scrutinize the temporally-resolved speed of active cargo transport in living cells, and show intermittent bursting motions. These nonlinear fluctuations follow a scaling law over several decades of time and space, the statistical…

Subcellular Processes · Quantitative Biology 2015-06-16 Bo Wang , James Kuo , Steve Granick

In this perspective article, we discuss bacterial populations as a model system of active matter. It allows for the exploration and characterization of various phases of active matter and brings rich implications for both physics and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-04-16 Kazumasa A. Takeuchi , Daiki Nishiguchi

The transport of active particles may occur in complex environments, in which it emerges from the interplay between the mobility of the active components and the quenched disorder of the environment. Here we explore structural and dynamical…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-03-31 Fergus J. Moore , John Russo Tanniemola B. Liverpool , C. Patrick Royall

Compartmentalization into biochemically distinct organelles constantly exchanging material is one of the hallmarks of eukaryotic cells. In the most naive picture of inter-organelle transport driven by concentration gradients, concentration…

Subcellular Processes · Quantitative Biology 2015-05-27 Serge Dmitrieff , Pierre Sens