Related papers: How flagellated bacteria wobble
Whirling and swerving, a bacterium is swimming in a test tube, foraging for food. On the surface of a vibrating bath, a droplet starts walking. A certain similarity, but mostly dissimilarity, between the physical memory that emerges in…
Marine bacterium Vibrio alginolyticus uses a single polar flagellum to navigate in an aqueous environment. Similar to Escherichia coli cells, the polar flagellar motor has two states; when the motor is counter-clockwise, the cell swims…
Living creatures exhibit a remarkable diversity of locomotion mechanisms, evolving structures specialised for interacting with their environment. In the vast majority of cases, locomotor behaviours such as flying, crawling, and running, are…
Bacteria living on surfaces use different types of motility mechanisms to move on the surface in search of food or to form micro-colonies. Twitching is one such form of motility employed by bacteria such as N. gonorrhoeae, in which the…
Centrifugation is a widespread laboratory technique used to separate mixtures into fractions characterized by a specific size, weight or density. We demonstrate that centrifugation can be also used to separate swimming cells having…
We create a mechanism inspired by bacterial swimmers, featuring two flexible flagella with individual control over rotation speed and direction in viscous fluid environments. Using readily available materials, we design and fabricate…
Concentrated suspensions of swimming microorganisms and other forms of active matter are known to display complex, self-organized spatio-temporal patterns on scales large compared to those of the individual motile units. Despite intensive…
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 numerically study the dynamics of a three-dimensional contractile fluid droplet in the bulk and under confinement. We show that varying activity leads to a variety of shapes and motile regimes whose motion is driven by an interplay…
Microorganism motility often takes place within complex, viscoelastic fluid environments, e.g., sperm in cervicovaginal mucus and bacteria in biofilms. In such complex fluids, strains and stresses generated by the microorganism are stored…
Bacterial flagellar motor (BFM) is one of the ion-driven molecular machines, which drives the rotation of flagellar filaments and enable bacteria to swim in viscous solutions. Understanding its mechanism is one challenge in biophysics.…
Some types of bacteria use rotating helical flagella to swim. The motion of such organisms takes place in the regime of low Reynolds numbers where viscous effects dominate and where the dynamics is governed by hydrodynamic interactions.…
In a fluid environment, flagellated microswimmers propel themselves by rotating their flagella. The morphology of these flagella significantly influences forward speed, swimming efficiency, and directional stability, which are critical for…
Bacterial swarming is a complex phenomenon in which thousands of self-propelled rod-shaped cells move coherently on surfaces, providing an excellent example of active matter. However, bacterial swarming is different from most studied…
Turbulence is ubiquitous, from oceanic currents to small-scale biological and quantum systems. Self-sustained turbulent motion in microbial suspensions presents an intriguing example of collective dynamical behavior amongst the simplest…
The modeling of the beating of cilia and flagella in fluids is a particularly active field of study, given the biological relevance of these organelles. Various mathematical models have been proposed to represent the nonlinear dynamics of…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often self-propel in external flows of vortical nature; relevant examples include algae in small-scale ocean eddies, spermatozoa in uterine peristaltic flows and bacteria in microfluidic devices. A…
We present a minimal physical model for the flagellar motor that enables bacteria to swim. Our model explains the experimentally measured torque-speed relationship of the proton-driven E. coli motor at various pH and temperature conditions.…
The flagellated bacterium Escherichia coli is increasingly used experimentally as a self-propelled swimmer. To obtain meaningful, quantitative results that are comparable between different laboratories, reproducible protocols are needed to…
Turbulence plays a major role in shaping marine community structure as it affects organism dispersal and guides fundamental ecological interactions. Below oceanographic mesoscale dynamics, turbulence also impinges on subtle…