Related papers: Dynamics of bacterial aggregates in microflows
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
Engineering spatially organized biofilms for creating adaptive and sustainable biomaterials is a forthcoming mission of synthetic biology. Existing technologies of patterning biofilm materials suffer limitations associated with the high…
The growth dynamics of rigid biopolymers, consisting of $N$ parallel protofilaments, is investigated theoretically using simple approximate models. In our approach, the structure of a polymer's growing end and lateral interactions between…
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…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
Biological systems achieve precise control over ambient fluids through the self-organization of active protein structures including flagella, cilia, and cytoskeletal networks. In active structures individual proteins consume chemical energy…
Many microorganisms live and evolve in complex fluids. Examples include mammalian spermatozoa in cervical mucus, worms (e.g., \textit{C. elegans}) in wet soil, and bacteria (e.g., \textit{H. pylori}) in our stomach lining. Due to the…
We investigate the effect of cooperative interactions in an ensemble of microorganisms, modelled as self-propelled disk-like and rod-like particles, in a three-dimensional turbulent flow to show flocking as an emergent phenomenon. Building…
Controlling the swimming behavior of bacteria is crucial, for example, to prevent contamination of ducts and catheters. We show the bacteria modeled by deformable microswimmers can accumulate in flows through straight microchannels either…
Bacterial biofilms mechanically behave as viscoelastic media consisting of micron-sized bacteria crosslinked to a selfproduced network of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) embedded in water. Structural principles for numerical…
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…
Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…
Living active collectives have evolved with remarkable self-patterning ability to meet the physical and biological constraints for growth and survival. However, how complex multicellular patterns emerge from a single founder cell remains…
This fluid dynamics video presents three-dimensional kinetic simulations of the dynamics in suspensions of oxytactic bacteria confined in thin liquid film surrounded by air. At the initial time, the bacterial concentration is uniform and…
Bioelectrochemical systems are electrochemical cells that rely on conductive biofilms covering an electrode. We consider the example of a microbial fuel cell, and we derive a dynamic model of ion transport, biochemical reactions and…
Many bacterial species readily develop biofilms that act as a protective matrix against external challenge, e.g. from antimicrobial treatment. Therefore, biofilms are often responsible for persistent and recurring infections. Established…
We present an experimental investigation of the agglomeration of microbubbles into a 2D microfoam and its flow in a rectangular microchannel. Using a flow-focusing method, we produce the foam in situ on a microfluidic chip for a large range…
This review article examines the complex dynamics of thin-film flows of granular suspensions spreading over rigid solid substrates with free air interfaces. Such systems feature an involved coupling of the free-surface dynamics with the…
We present a model for unicellular algal growth as motivated by several experiments implicating the importance of calcium ions and ``loosening'' enzymes in morphogenesis. A growing cell at rest in a diffusive calcium solution is viewed as…
Thin films are usually obtained by depositing atoms with a continuous flux. We show that using a chopped flux changes the growth and the morphology of the film. A simple scaling analysis predicts how the island densities change as a…