Related papers: Do active nematic self-mixing dynamics help growin…
The spreading of bacterial populations is central to processes in agriculture, the environment, and medicine. However, existing models of spreading typically focus on cells in unconfined settings--despite the fact that many bacteria inhabit…
Polymers are a primary building block in many biomaterials, often interacting with anisotropic backgrounds. While previous studies have considered polymer dynamics within nematic solvents, rarely are the the effects of anisotropic viscosity…
The topological properties of many materials are central to their behavior, with the dynamics of topological defects being particularly important to intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, active materials. In this paper, local manipulation of…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
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…
Contact inhibition limits migration and proliferation of cells in cell colonies. We consider a multiphase field model to investigate the growth dynamics of a cell colony, composed of proliferating cells. The model takes into account the…
Densely packed, motile bacteria can adopt collective states not seen in conventional, passive materials. These states remain in many ways mysterious, and their physical characterization can aid our understanding of natural bacterial…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Being intrinsically nonequilibrium, active materials can potentially perform functions that would be thermodynamically forbidden in passive materials. However, active systems have diverse local attractors that correspond to distinct…
Microfluidics involves the manipulation of flows at the microscale, typically requiring external power sources to generate pressure gradients. Alternatively, harnessing flows from active fluids, which are usually chaotic, has been proposed…
Cell monolayers are a central model system to tissue biophysics. In vivo, epithelial tissues are curved on the scale of microns, and curvature's role in the onset of spontaneous tissue flows is still not well-understood. Here, we present a…
Bacterial processes ranging from gene expression to motility and biofilm formation are constantly challenged by internal and external noise. While the importance of stochastic fluctuations has been appreciated for chemotaxis, it is…
We consider a microscopic field theoretical approach for interacting active nematic particles. With only steric interactions the self-propulsion strength in such systems can lead to different collective behaviour, e.g., synchronized…
Many bacteria live in natural and clinical environments with abundant macromolecular polymers. Macromolecular fluids commonly display viscoelasticity and non-Newtonian rheological behavior; it is unclear how these complex-fluid properties…
The dispersal of cells from an initially constrained location is a crucial aspect of many physiological phenomena ranging from morphogenesis to tumour spreading. In such processes, the way cell-cell interactions impact the motion of single…
In invasive breast cancer, cell clusters of varying sizes and shapes are embedded in the fibrous extracellular matrix (ECM). Although the prevailing view attributes this structure to increasing disorder resulting from loss of function and…
Active turbulence in dense active systems is characterized by high vorticity on a length scale that is large compared to that of individual entities. We describe the properties of active turbulence as momentum propagation is screened by…
Cell crawling crucially depends on the collective dynamics of the acto-myosin cytoskeleton. However, it remains an open question to what extent cell polarization and persistent motion depend on continuous regulatory mechanisms and…
Nematic colloids exhibit a large diversity of topological defects and structures induced by colloidal particles in the orientationally ordered liquid crystal host fluids. These defects and field configurations define elastic interactions…
The natural habitats of microorganisms in the human microbiome and ocean and soil ecosystems are full of colloids and macromolecules, which impart non-Newtonian flow properties drastically affecting the locomotion of swimming…