Related papers: Self-organized intracellular twisters
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
In tissues as diverse as amphibian skin and the human airway, the cilia that propel fluid are grouped in sparsely distributed multiciliated cells (MCCs). We investigate fluid transport in this "mosaic" architecture, with emphasis on the…
Particles suspended in a viscous fluid circle in optical vortices generated by holographic optical-tweezer techniques [Curtis J E and Grier D G 2003 Phys. Rev. Lett. 90 133901]. We model this system and show that hydrodynamic interactions…
Synchronized oscillations are of critical functional importance in many biological systems. We show that such oscillations can arise without centralized coordination in a disordered system of electrically coupled excitable and passive…
We investigate the transport dynamics of elongated particles in cellular vortical flows that undergo spatial oscillations over time. Experimental flow visualizations reveal mixed flow fields with chaotic and elliptic regions coexisting.…
While cell crawling on a solid surface is relatively well understood, and relies on substrate adhesion, some cells can also swim in the bulk, through mechanisms that are still largely unclear. Here, we propose a minimal model for in-bulk…
From the Golgi apparatus to endosomes, organelles in the endomembrane system exhibit complex and varied morphologies that are often related to their function. Such membrane-bound organelles operate far from equilibrium due to directed…
Many active fluid systems encountered in biology are set in total geometric confinement. Cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells is a prominent and ubiquitous example, in which cargo-carrying molecular motors move along polymer filaments and…
By extracting unstable invariant solutions directly from body-forced three-dimensional turbulence, we study the dynamical processes at play when the forcing is large scale and either unidirectional in the momentum or the vorticity…
Flocking behavior is observed in biological systems from the cellular to super-organismal length scales, and the mechanisms and purposes of this behavior are objects of intense interest. In this paper, we study the collective dynamics of…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps the…
When the motion of a motile cell is observed closely, it appears erratic, and yet the combination of nonequilibrium forces and surfaces can produce striking examples of organization in microbial systems. While most of our current…
Coarsening, the process where larger structures grow at the expense of smaller ones, is a fundamental aspect of multiphase systems. The cell cytoplasm exemplifies an out-of-equilibrium multiphase system, where phase-separated condensates…
Small - but finite - fluid inertia can be leveraged to generate steady flows out of liquid vibrations around an immersed interface. In engineering, external high-frequency drivers (10$^2$-10$^5$ Hz) allow this inertial rectification…
Thin cylindrical membranes arise in a wide variety of biological systems ranging from tubular structures on and within cell membranes to in-vitro experiments on artificial vesicles. Motor proteins embedded in such fluidic membranes often…
Self-organized dynamic patterns in dense active matter are striking manifestations of non-equilibrium physics. A prominent example is the macroscopic elliptical motion observed in quasi-2D bacterial suspensions, which has lacked a physical…
Spatiotemporal patterns in multicellular systems are important to understanding tissue dynamics, for instance, during embryonic development and disease. Here, we use a multiphase field model to study numerically the behavior of a…
The effect of a network of fixed rigid fibers on fluid flow is investigated by means of three-dimensional direct numerical simulations using an immersed boundary method for the fluid-structure coupling. Different flows are considered (i.e.,…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…