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Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
The capability to sense and respond to external mechanical stimuli at various timescales is essential to many physiological aspects in plants, including self-protection, intake of nutrients, and reproduction. Remarkably, some plants have…
Food production needs to increase significantly in 30 years, and water loss from plants may hold one key, especially relevant in a time of climate change. The plant leaf cuticle is the final defence of leaves in drought and at night, and so…
Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…
Despite the importance that fluid flow plays in transporting and organizing populations, few laboratory systems exist to systematically investigate the impact of advection on their spatial evolutionary dynamics. To address this problem, we…
Plants have developed intricate mechanisms to adapt to changing light conditions. Besides photo- and helio- tropism -- the differential growth towards light and the diurnal motion with respect to sunlight -- chloroplast motion acts as a…
Biofilms are microbial collectives that occupy a diverse array of surfaces. The function and evolution of biofilms are strongly influenced by the spatial arrangement of different strains and species within them, but how spatiotemporal…
In natural environments, solid surfaces present both opportunities and challenges for bacteria. On one hand, they serve as platforms for biofilm formation, crucial for bacterial colonization and resilience in harsh conditions. On the other…
Carnivores interact with herbivores to indirectly impact plant populations, creating trophic cascades within plant-herbivore-carnivore systems. We developed and analyzed a food chain model to gain a mechanistic understanding of the critical…
Motile cilia are a striking example of functional cellular organelle, conserved across all the eukaryotic species. Motile cilia allow swimming of cells and small organisms and transport of liquids across epithelial tissues. Whilst the…
The carnivorous aquatic Waterwheel Plant (Aldrovanda vesiculosa L.) and the closely related terrestrial Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula SOL. EX J. ELLIS) both feature elaborate snap-traps, which shut after reception of an external…
Rhizomes play fundamental roles in plant evolution, persistence, and environmental adaptation by enabling clonal propagation, resource storage, and stress resilience. Despite their ecological and agronomic importance across diverse plant…
Biological active materials such as bacterial biofilms and eukaryotic cells thrive in confined micro-spaces. Here, we show through numerical simulations that confinement can serve as a mechanical guidance to achieve distinct modes of…
Microbes thrive in diverse porous environments -- from soil and riverbeds to human lungs and cancer tissues -- spanning multiple scales and conditions. Short- to long-term fluctuations in local factors induce spatio-temporal…
Background : The carnivorous plants of the genus Nepenthes, widely distributed in the Asian tropics, rely mostly on nutrients derived from arthropods trapped in their pitcher-shaped leaves and digested by their enzymatic fluid. The genus…
Predators and their foraging strategies often determine ecosystem structure and function. Yet, the role of protozoan predators in microbial soil ecosystems remains elusive despite the importance of these ecosystems to global biogeochemical…
Many cells exhibit large-scale active circulation of their entire fluid contents, a process termed cytoplasmic streaming. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in plant cells, often presenting strikingly regimented flow patterns. The…
Microbial interactions regulate their spread and survival in competitive environments. It is not clear if the physical parameters of the environment regulate the outcome of these interactions. In this work, we show that the opportunistic…
Plants are a paradigm for active shape control in response to stimuli. For instance, it is well-known that a tilted plant will eventually straighten vertically, demonstrating the influence of both an external stimulus, gravity, and an…