Related papers: How flagellated bacteria wobble
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…
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…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
Near a solid boundary, E. coli swims in clockwise circular motion. We provide a hydrodynamic model for this behavior. We show that circular trajectories are natural consequences of force-free and torque-free swimming, and the hydrodynamic…
Active systems comprised of self-propelled units show fascinating transitions from Brownian-like dynamics to collective coherent motion. Swirling of swimming bacteria is a spectacular example. This study demonstrates that a nematic liquid…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
Micro-organisms usually can swim in their liquid environment by flagellar or ciliary beating. In this numerical work, we analyze the influence of flagellar beating on the orbits of a swimming cell in a shear flow. We also calculate the…
We combine experiments with simulations to investigate the fluid-structure interaction of a flexible helical rod rotating in a viscous fluid, under low Reynolds number conditions. Our analysis takes into account the coupling between the…
Unraveling bacterial strategies for spatial exploration is crucial for understanding the complexity in the organization of life. Bacterial motility determines the spatio-temporal structure of microbial communities, controls infection…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
The beating flagella of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii play a prominent role in cellular mechanics, enabling cells to both displace and sense surrounding fluid. Specifically, flagellum-induced fluid transport enables microalgae to…
We systematically investigate how flagellar morphology governs the stability of bacterial Brownian motion, evaluating the effectiveness of a simplified chiral two-body model. This model, which effectively captures the specific bacterial…
Microorganisms such as algae and bacteria move in a viscous environment with extremely low Reynolds ($Re$), where the viscous drag dominates the inertial forces. They have adapted to this environment by developing specialized features such…
Recent experiments proposed to use confined bacteria in order to generate flows near surfaces. We develop a mathematical and a computational model of this fluid transport using a linear superposition of fundamental flow singularities. The…
Multi-flagellated bacteria utilize the hydrodynamic interaction between their filamentary tails, known as flagella, to swim and change their swimming direction in low Reynolds number flow. This interaction, referred to as bundling and…
The bundling of flagella is known to create a "run" phase, where the bacteria moves in a nearly straight line rather than making changes in direction. Historically, mechanical explanations for the bundling phenomenon intrigued many…
Many swimming bacteria naturally inhabit confined environments, yet how confinement influences their swimming behaviors remains unclear. Here, we combine experiments, continuum modeling and particle-based simulations to investigate…
Active turbulence, or chaotic self-organized collective motion, is often observed in concentrated suspensions of motile bacteria and other systems of self-propelled interacting agents. To date, there is no fundamental understanding of how…