Related papers: Active random force promotes diffusion in bacteria…
We give a description of cell diffusion in a soft tissue, paying special attention to the coupling of force, matter, and microforce balance laws through a suitable dissipation principle. To this end, we cast our framework into a multi-level…
Replication time is among the most important components of a bacterial cell's reproductive fitness. Paradoxically, larger cells replicate in less time than smaller cells despite the fact that building a larger cell requires increased…
Background: This study is mainly motivated by the need of understanding how the diffusion behaviour of a biomolecule (or even of a larger object) is affected by other moving macromolecules, organelles, and so on, inside a living cell,…
We investigate morphologies of proliferating cellular tissues using a newly developed numerical simulation model for mechanical cell division and migration in 2D. The model is applied to a bimodal mixture consisting of stiff cells with a…
We study the dynamics of a self-propelled particle advected by a steady laminar flow. The persistent motion of the self-propelled particle is described by an active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We focus on the diffusivity properties of the…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…
The movement of motor particles consisting of one or several molecular motors bound to a cargo particle is studied theoretically. The particles move on patterns of immobilized filaments. Several patterns are described for which the motor…
Cell motility is one of the most fundamental phenomena underlying biological processes that maintain living organisms alive. Here we introduce a simple model to describe the motility of cells which include not only time-correlated internal…
We study various combinations of active diffusion with branching, as an extension of standard reaction-diffusion processes. We concentrate on the selection of the asymptotic wavefront speed for thermal run-and-tumble and for thermal active…
We use moving light patterns to control the motion of {\it Escherichia coli} bacteria whose motility is photo-activated. Varying the pattern speed controls the magnitude and direction of the bacterial flux, and therefore the accumulation of…
The effect of mechanical interactions between cells in the spreading of bacterial populations was investigated in one-dimensional space. A continuum-mechanics approach, comprising cell migration, proliferation, and exclusion processes, was…
Metabolic reactions of single-cell organisms are routinely observed to become dispensable or even incapable of carrying activity under certain circumstances. Yet, the mechanisms as well as the range of conditions and phenotypes associated…
Macromolecules occupy between 34 and 44% of the cell cytoplasm, about half the maximum pack- ing density of spheres in three dimension. Yet, there is no clear understanding of what is special about this value. To address this fundamental…
A novel mechanism of reaction-induced active molecular motion, not involving any kind of self-propulsion, is proposed and analyzed. Because of the momentum exchange with the surrounding solvent, conformational transitions in…
A prime example of non-equilibrium or active environment is a biological cell. In order to understand in-vivo functioning of biomolecules such as proteins, chromatins, a description beyond equilibrium is absolutely necessary. In this…
Cells generally convert nutrient resources to useful products via energy transduction. Accordingly, the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion process is one of the most essential characteristics of living organisms. However, although…
We derive an analytic expression for the distribution of velocities of multiple interacting active particles which we test by numerical simulations. In clear contrast with equilibrium we find that the velocities are coupled to positions.…
We present a model of soft active particles that leads to a rich array of collective behavior found also in dense biological swarms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms. Our model uses only local interactions, such as Vicsek-type…
Recent experiments have revealed that cytoplasms become glassy when their metabolism is suppressed, while they maintain fluidity in a living state. The mechanism of this active fluidization is not clear, especially for bacterial cytoplasms,…