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Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…
Molecular spiders are synthetic molecular motors based on DNA nanotechnology. While natural molecular motors have evolved towards very high efficiency, it remains a major challenge to develop efficient designs for man-made molecular motors.…
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…
Micro-organisms expend energy moving through complex media. While propulsion speed is an important property of locomotion, efficiency is another factor that may determine the swimming gait adopted by a micro-organism in order to locomote in…
Many microswimmers are inherently chiral, and this chirality can introduce fascinating behaviors in a collection of microswimmers. The dynamics become even more intriguing when two types of microswimmers with distinct chirality are mixed.…
Driven or active suspensions can display fascinating collective behavior, where coherent motions or structures arise on a scale much larger than that of the constituent particles. Here, we report experiments and numerical simulations…
Biomolecular condensates organize biochemical processes by spatially concentrating molecules while allowing for dynamic exchange with their surroundings. However, transport across their interface can be strongly attenuated, leading to…
We study an effect of large-scale coherent structures on global properties of turbulent convection in laboratory experiments in air flow in a rectangular chamber with aspect ratios $A \approx 2$ and $A\approx 4$ (with the Rayleigh numbers…
Contact between particles and motile cells underpins a wide variety of biological processes, from nutrient capture and ligand binding, to grazing, viral infection and cell-cell communication. The window of opportunity for these interactions…
It has been shown that a nanoliter chamber separated by a wall of asymmetric obstacles can lead to an inhomogeneous distribution of self-propelled microorganisms. Although it is well established that this rectification effect arises from…
Through high-fidelity numerical simulation, the effect of the arrangement of micropillars on the flow characteristics and momentum transport has been extensively investigated. The surface friction due to the complex flow characteristics and…
We introduce a measure for energetic efficiency of biological cilia acting individually or collectively and numerically determine the optimal beating patterns according to this criterion. Maximizing the efficiency of a single cilium leads…
In biology, cells undergo deformations under the action of flow caused by the fluid surrounding them. These flows lead to shape changes and instabilities that have been explored in detail for single component vesicles. However, cell…
The guidance of human sperm cells under confinement in quasi 2D microchambers is investigated using a purely physical method to control their distribution. Transport property measurements and simulations are performed with dilute sperm…
Cilia and flagella exhibit regular bending waves that perform mechanical work on the surrounding fluid, to propel cellular swimmers and pump fluids inside organisms. Here, we quantify a force-velocity relationship of the beating flagellum,…
Cell motility in viscous fluids is ubiquitous and affects many biological processes, including reproduction, infection, and the marine life ecosystem. Here we review the biophysical and mechanical principles of locomotion at the small…
Microorganisms navigate through fluid, often confined by complex environments, to survive and sustain life. Inspired by this fact, we consider a model system and seek to understand the wall curvature driven dynamics of a squirmer, a…
In this fluid dynamics video, we compare the deformation of two flexible particles as they propagate through a sudden constriction of a liquid filled channel under constant-flux flow: a gas bubble, and a capsule formed by encapsulating a…
Biomolecular condensates help organize the cell cytoplasm and nucleoplasm into spatial compartments with different chemical compositions. A key feature of such compositional patterning is the local enrichment of enzymatically active…
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…