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Flows over remarkably long distances are crucial to the functioning of many organisms, across all kingdoms of life. Coordinated flows are fundamental to power deformations, required for migration or development, or to spread resources and…
We demonstrate that active rotations in chemically signalling particles, such as autochemotactic {\it E. coli} close to walls, create a route for pattern formation based on a nonlinear yet deterministic instability mechanism. For slow…
The aim of this work is to quantify the spatio-temporal dynamics of flow-driven amoeboid locomotion in small ($\sim$100 $\mu$m) fragments of the true slime mold \phys {\it polycephalum}. In this model organism, cellular contraction drives…
We report some basic results regarding transport in disordered reaction-diffusion systems with birth (A->2A), death (A->0), and binary competition (2A->A) processes. We consider a model in which the growth process is only allowed to take…
Cell migration is often accompanied by collisions with other cells, which can lead to cessation of movement, repolarization, and migration away from the contact site - a process termed contact inhibition of locomotion (CIL). During CIL, the…
Active and diffusive motion in Brownian particles are regularly observed in fluidic environments, albeit at different time scales. Here, we experimentally study the dynamics of highly asymmetric microclusters trapped in air employing…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
This paper presents an interesting experimental example of voter-model statistics in biology. In recent work on mouse tail-skin, where proliferating cells are confined to a two-dimensional layer, we showed that cells proliferate and…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…
Diffusive transport of particles or, more generally, small objects is a ubiquitous feature of physical and chemical reaction systems. In configurations containing confining walls or constrictions transport is controlled both by the…
Birds in a flock move in a correlated way, resulting in large polarization of velocities. A good understanding of this collective behavior exists for linear motion of the flock. Yet observing actual birds, the center of mass of the group…
We introduce a stochastic lattice gas model including two particle species and two parallel lanes. One lane with exclusion interaction and directed motion and the other lane without exclusion and unbiased diffusion, mimicking a micotubule…
Conventional discrete-to-continuum approaches have seen their limitation in describing the collective behaviour of the multi-polar configurations of dislocations, which are widely observed in crystalline materials. The reason is that…
Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…
Many cell types display random motility on two-dimensional substrates, but crawl persistently in a single direction when confined in a microchannel or on an adhesive micropattern. Does this imply that the motility mechanism of confined…
The importance of individual cells in a developing multicellular organism is well known but precisely how the individual cellular characteristics of those cells collectively drive the emergence of robust, homeostatic structures is less well…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
{\sl Escherichia coli} ({\sl E. coli}) bacteria govern their trajectories by switching between running and tumbling modes as a function of the nutrient concentration they experienced in the past. At short time one observes a drift of the…
Cells in an epithelial monolayer coordinate motion with their neighbors giving rise to collectively moving packs of sizes spanning multiple cell diameters. The physical mechanism controlling the pack size, however, remains unclear. A…
Optical tracking in vivo experiments reveal that diffusion of particles in biological cells is strongly enhanced in the presence of ATP and the experimental data for animal cells could previously be reproduced within a phenomenological…