Related papers: Amoeboid movement utilizes the shape coupled bifur…
Cell migration is fundamental to development, tissue organization, immune response, and disease progression. Amoeboid motility is distinguished by rapid motion and strongly fluctuating cell shapes, reflecting the intrinsically nonlinear…
Several micro-organisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, use flagella or cilia to swim in a fluid, while many other micro-organisms instead use ample shape deformation, described as amoeboid, to propel themselves by either crawling…
Traditionally, the primary mode for locomotion of amoeboid cells was thought to be crawling on a substrate. Recently, it has been experimentally shown that \textit{Dictostelium} amoeba and neutrophils can also swim in a directed fashion.…
Active fluid droplets are a class of soft materials exhibiting autonomous motion sustained by an energy supply. Such systems have been shown to capture motility regimes typical of biological cells and are ideal candidates as building-block…
Many eukaryotic cells undergo frequent shape changes (described as amoeboid motion) that enable them to move forward. We investigate the effect of confinement on a minimal model of amoeboid swimmer. Complex pictures emerge: (i) The…
The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…
Amoeboid cell migration is characterized by frequent changes of the direction of motion and resembles a persistent random walk on long time scales. Although it is well known that cell migration is typically driven by the actin cytoskeleton,…
The motility of adherent eukaryotic cells is driven by the dynamics of the actin cytoskeleton. Despite the common force-generating actin machinery, different cell types often show diverse modes of locomotion that differ in their shape…
As society paves its way towards device miniaturization and precision medicine, micro-scale actuation and guided transport become increasingly prominent research fields with high impact in both technological and clinical contexts. In order…
During migration, amoeboid cells perform a cycle of quasi-periodic repetitive events (motility cycle). the cell length and the strain energy exchanged with the substrate oscillate in time with an average frequency, f, on top of which are…
Active matter comprised of self-propelled interacting units holds a major promise for extraction of useful work from its seemingly chaotic out-of-equilibrium dynamics. Streamlining active matter to produce work is especially important at…
Amoeboid motion is a dynamic mode of cell motility essential for processes such as the immune response and wound healing. This review examines recent developments in the mathematical and computational modeling of amoeboid crawling, focusing…
We present a unified discussion of three types of near-spherical amoeboid microswimmers, driven by periodic, axially symmetric, achiral deformations (swim strokes): a solid deformable body, a vesicle with incompressible fluid membrane, and…
We investigate flow-driven amoeboid motility as exhibited by microplasmodia of Physarum polycephalum. A poroelastic two-phase model with rigid boundaries is extended to the case of free boundaries and substrate friction. The cytoskeleton is…
The encapsulation of active particles, such as bacteria or active colloids, inside a droplet gives rise to nontrivial shape dynamics and droplet motility. To understand this behavior, we derive an asymptotic solution for the fluid flow…
We analyze the migration characteristics of a droplet in an oscillatory flow field in a parallel plate micro-confinement. Using phase filed formalism, we capture the dynamical evolution of the droplet over a wide range of the frequency of…
The aim of this work is to quantify the spatio-temporal dynamics of flow-driven amoeboid locomotion in small ($\sim$100 $\mu$m) fragments of the true slime mold \phys {\it polycephalum}. In this model organism, cellular contraction drives…
To explore and react to their environment, living micro-swimmers have developed sophisticated strategies for locomotion - in particular, motility with multiple gaits. To understand the physical principles associated with such a behavioural…
Eukaryotic cells are large enough to detect signals and then orient to them by differentiating the signal strength across the length and breadth of the cell. Amoebae, fibroblasts, neutrophils and growth cones all behave in this way. Little…
The coupling of the internal mechanisms of cell polarization to cell shape deformations and subsequent cell crawling poses many interdisciplinary scientific challenges. Several mathematical approaches have been proposed to model the…