Related papers: Persistent pseudopod splitting is an effective che…
Many motile biological cells navigate along concentration gradients of signaling molecules: This chemotaxis guides for instance sperm cells from marine invertebrates, which have to find egg cells in the ocean. While chemotaxis has been…
A phase field approach is proposed to model the chemotaxis of Dictyostelium discoideum. In this framework, motion is controlled by active forces as determined by the Meinhardt model of chemical dynamics which is used to simulate directional…
Communication and coordination play a major role in the ability of bacterial cells to adapt to ever changing environments and conditions. Recent work has shown that such coordination underlies several aspects of bacterial responses…
Amoeboid cell motility is relevant in a wide variety of biomedical applications such as wound healing, cancer metastasis, and embryonic morphogenesis. It is characterized by pronounced changes of the cell shape associated with expansions…
Contact inhibition plays a crucial role in the motility of cells, the process of wound healing, and the formation of tumors. By mimicking the mechanical motion of calls crawling on a substrate using a pseudopod, we constructed a minimal…
The chemotactic pathway allows bacteria to respond and adapt to environmental changes, by tuning the tumbling and running motions that are due to clockwise and counterclockwise rotations of their flagella. The pathway is tightly regulated…
Cell spreading and motility on an adhesive substrate are driven by the active physical forces generated by the actin cytoskeleton. We have recently shown that coupling curved membrane complexes to protrusive forces, exerted by the actin…
In vivo, cells navigate through complex environments filled with obstacles. Recently, the term 'topotaxis' has been introduced for navigation along topographic cues such as obstacle density gradients. Experimental and mathematical efforts…
Active navigation in disordered media depends on a biased random walk interacting with environmental constraints. Using E. coli chemotactic navigation in agar gels as a model system, we reveal a fundamental trade-off between diffusive…
Motivated by observations of the dynamics of {\it Myxococcus xanthus}, we present a self-interacting random walk model that describes the competition between chemokinesis and chemotaxis. Cells are constrained to move in one dimension, but…
Escherichia coli is a motile bacterium that moves up a chemoattractant gradient by performing a biased random walk composed of alternating runs and tumbles. Previous models of run and tumble chemotaxis neglect one or more features of the…
We develop methods for investigating protein drift-diffusion dynamics in heterogeneous cell membranes and the roles played by geometry, diffusion, chemical kinetics, and phase separation. Our hybrid stochastic numerical methods combine…
Complex spatial patterns in biological systems often arise through self-organization without a central coordination, guided by local interactions and chemical signaling. In this study, we explore how motility-dependent chemical deposition…
Through evolution, bacteria have developed the ability to perform chemotactic motion in order to find nourishment. By adopting a machine learning approach, we aim to understand how this behavior arises. We consider run-and-tumble agents…
Spectral line profiles are powerful diagnostic tools for both laboratory and astrophysical plasmas, as their shape is sensitive to the plasma environment. The low-frequency component of the electric microfield is an important input for…
The bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli) moves in its natural environment in a series of straight runs, interrupted by tumbles which cause change of direction. It performs chemotaxis towards chemo-attractants by extending the duration of…
Reinforcement learning for multi-turn agents suffers from a credit-assignment mismatch: rewards are sparse and trajectory-level, while success often hinges on a few local decisions. Existing online policy distillation (OPD) provides denser…
Animal cells can sense chemical gradients without moving, and are faced with the challenge of migrating towards a target despite noisy information on the target position. Here we discuss optimal search strategies for a chaser that moves by…
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…
We study the chemostat model for one species competing for one nutrient using a Lyapunov-type analysis. We design the dilution rate function so that all solutions of the chemostat converge to a prescribed periodic solution. In terms of…