Related papers: Microbes in porous environments: From active inter…
Soil microbial communities are known to be robust against perturbations such as nutrition inputs, which appears as an obstacle for the soil improvement. On the other hand, its adaptable aspect has been also reported. Here we propose simple…
We investigate the steady-state organisation of active particles residing on an interface. Particle activity induces interface deformations, while the local shape of the interface guides particle movement. We consider multiple species of…
Clonal microbes can switch between different phenotypes and recent theoretical work has shown that stochastic switching between these subpopulations can stabilize microbial communities. This phenotypic switching need not be stochastic,…
Vegetation often understood merely as the result of long-term climate conditions. However, vegetation itself plays a fundamental role in shaping Earth's climate by regulating the energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles across terrestrial…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
Inputs to signaling pathways can have complex statistics that depend on the environment and on the behavioral response to previous stimuli. Such behavioral feedback is particularly important in navigation. Successful navigation relies on…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental aspects of many living and engineering systems. Here, the scale of biological agents covers a wide range, from nanomotors, cytoskeleton, and cells, to insects, fish, birds, and people. Inspired…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
The physical interpretation of the functioning of the adaptive immune system, which has been thoroughly characterized on genetic and molecular levels, provides a unique opportunity to define an adaptive self-organizing biological system in…
In complex systems, groups of interacting objects may form prevalent and persistent spatiotemporal patterns, which we refer to as motifs. These motifs can exhibit features that reveal how individual objects interact with one another.…
We investigate pores in fluid membranes by molecular dynamics simulations of an amphiphile-solvent mixture, using a molecular coarse-grained model. The amphiphilic membranes self-assemble into a lamellar stack of amphiphilic bilayers…
A fundamental challenge in microbial ecology is determining whether bacteria compete or cooperate in different environmental conditions. With recent advances in genome-scale metabolic models, we are now capable of simulating interactions…
Collective rotations are common in active matter, enhancing cohesion, transport, and mixing. They are typically attributed to chiral non-reciprocal dynamics due to intrinsic particle chirality, torque-generating interactions among units, or…
How systems are endowed with migration capacity is a fascinating question with implications ranging from the design of novel active systems to the control of microbial populations. Bacteria, which can be found in a variety of environments,…
The past two decades have seen a remarkable progress in the development of synthetic colloidal agents which are capable of creating directed motion in an unbiased environment at the microscale. These self-propelling particles are often…
Phase separation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatial organization inside biological cells. However, despite the clear relevance to virtually all physiological functions, we understand surprisingly little about what phases…
In this perspective article, we discuss bacterial populations as a model system of active matter. It allows for the exploration and characterization of various phases of active matter and brings rich implications for both physics and…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…
Interactions between microorganisms and solid boundaries play an important role in biological processes, like egg fertilisation, biofilm formation and soil colonisation, where microswimmers move within a structured environment. Despite…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…