Related papers: Giant enhancement of bacterial upstream swimming i…
The swimming motility of bacteria is driven by the action of bacterial flagellar motors, whose outermost structure is a long and thin helicoidal filament. When rotated, the fluid medium exerts an anisotropic viscous drag on the flagellar…
Swimming micro-organisms such as flagellated bacteria and sperm cells have fascinating locomotion capabilities. Inspired by their natural motion, there is an ongoing effort to develop artificial robotic nano-swimmers for potential in-body…
Motile bacteria play essential roles in biology that rely on their dynamic behaviors, including their ability to navigate, interact, and self-organize. However, bacteria dynamics on fluid interfaces are not well understood. Swimmers…
We review recent work on active colloids or swimmers, such as self-propelled microorganisms, phoretic colloidal particles, and artificial micro-robotic systems, moving in fluid-like environments. These environments can be water-like and…
Conjugation accelerates bacterial evolution by enabling bacteria to acquire genes horizontally from their neighbors. Plasmid donors must physically encounter and connect with recipients to allow plasmid transfer, and different environments…
Many biological fluids are composed of suspended polymers immersed in a viscous fluid. A prime example is mucus, where the polymers are also known to form a network. While the presence of this microstructure is linked with an overall…
Microscale propulsion is integral to numerous biomedical systems, for example biofilm formation and human reproduction, where the surrounding fluids comprise suspensions of polymers. These polymers endow the fluid with non-Newtonian…
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…
Equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the effect of phase transitions on the transport properties of highly-confined water between parallel graphene sheets. An abrupt reduction by several orders of magnitude in…
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…
Microswimmers often use chirality to generate translational movement from rotation motion, exhibiting distinct behaviors in complex fluids compared to simple Newtonian fluids. However, the underlying mechanism remains incompletely…
Understanding how the physical properties of a fluid influence bacterial behavior is essential for explaining how microorganisms interact with their environment and with animal hosts. Here, we examine how changes in fluid viscosity and…
We study the transport of bacteria in a porous media modeled by a square channel containing one cylindrical obstacle via molecular dynamics simulations coupled to a lattice Boltzmann fluid. Our bacteria model is a rod-shaped rigid body…
Many cells exploit the bending or rotation of flagellar filaments in order to self-propel in viscous fluids. While appropriate theoretical modelling is available to capture flagella locomotion in simple, Newtonian fluids, formidable…
Although the motility of the flagellated bacteria, Escherichia coli, has been widely studied, the effect of viscosity on swimming speed remains controversial. The swimming mode of wild-type E.coli is often idealized as a "run-and- tumble"…
Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…
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…
We develop a numerical framework to simulate the locomotion of a flagellated bacterium with a spheroidal head (such as Escherichia coli) in biological fluids like mucus, which are entangled polymer solutions exhibiting elasto-viscoplastic…
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…
Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…