Related papers: Molecular and colloidal transport in bacterial cel…
Bacterial biofilms cost an enormous amount of resources in the health, medical, and industrial sectors. To understand early biofilm formation, beginning from planktonic states of active bacterial suspensions (such as Escherichia coli) to…
Biofilms are communities of bacteria adhered to surfaces. Recently, biofilms of rod-shaped bacteria were observed at single-cell resolution and shown to develop from a disordered, two-dimensional layer of founder cells into a…
Diffusive transport of small molecules within the internal structures of biological and synthetic material systems is complex because the crowded environment presents chemical and physical barriers to mobility. We explored this mobility…
The formation of bacterial biofilms on solid surfaces within a fluid starts when bacteria attach to the substrate. Understanding environmental factors affecting the attachment and the early stages of the biofilm development as well as the…
Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) are very selective filters that monitor the transport between the cytoplasm and the nucleoplasm. Two models have been suggested for the plug of the NPC. They are (i) it is a reversible hydrogel or (ii) it is a…
Bacteria living on surfaces use different types of motility mechanisms to move on the surface in search of food or to form micro-colonies. Twitching is one such form of motility employed by bacteria such as N. gonorrhoeae, in which the…
In this paper we derive a pore-scale model for permeable biofilm formation in a two-dimensional pore. The pore is divided in two phases: water and biofilm. The biofilm is assumed to consist of four components: water, extracellular polymeric…
Free boundaries of biofilms advancing on surfaces evolve according to conservation laws coupled with systems of partial differential equations for velocities, pressures and chemicals affecting cell behavior. Thin film approximations lead to…
The transport of molecules through biological and synthetic nanopores is governed by multiple stochastic processes that lead to noisy, fluctuating currents. Disentangling the characteristics of different noise-generating mechanisms is…
Microtubules are protein polymers that form "molecular highways" for long-range transport within living cells. Molecular motors actively step along microtubules to shuttle cellular materials between the nucleus and the cell periphery; this…
The macroscopic phenomenon of filtration is the separation between suspended and liquid phases and it takes place in natural environments (e.g. groundwater, soil, hyporheic zone) and industrial systems (e.g. filtration plants,…
Bacterial biofilms are usually assumed to originate from individual cells deposited on a surface. However, many biofilm-forming bacteria tend to aggregate in the planktonic phase so that it is possible that many natural and infectious…
The design of biologically-inspired wireless communication systems using bacteria as the basic element of the system is initially motivated by a phenomenon called \emph{Quorum Sensing}. Due to high randomness in the individual behavior of a…
The spread of microbial infections is governed by the self-organization of bacteria on surfaces. Limitations of live imaging techniques make collective behaviors in clinically relevant systems challenging to quantify. Here, novel…
Collective behavior of bacterial colonies plays critical roles in adaptability, survivability, biofilm expansion and infection. We employ an individual-based model of an interstitial biofilm to study emergent pattern formation based on the…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
A microscopic physical analysis of the various resistive effects involved in the electronic detection of single biomolecules in a nanopore of a MoS2 nanoribbon is presented. The analysis relies on a combined experimental-theoretical…
Engineering spatially organized biofilms for creating adaptive and sustainable biomaterials is a forthcoming mission of synthetic biology. Existing technologies of patterning biofilm materials suffer limitations associated with the high…
Nanofibrous networks are the foundation and natural building strategy for all life forms on our planet. Apart from providing structural integrity to cells and tissues, they also provide a porous scaffold allowing transport of substances,…
The transport of macromolecules, such as DNA, through the cytoskeleton is critical to wide-ranging cellular processes from cytoplasmic streaming to transcription. The rigidity and steric hindrances imparted by the network of filaments…