Related papers: Pattern formation in e. coli through negative chem…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
Biomolecular condensates are formed via liquid-liquid phase separation of proteins, often together with nucleic acids, typically driven by interactions between low-affinity binding sites. The computational study of such condensates that…
Hydrodynamics and confinement dominate bacterial mobility near solid or air-water boundaries, causing flagellated bacteria to move in circular trajectories. This phenomenon results from the counter-rotation between the bacterial body and…
The field of active matter explores the behaviors of self propelled agents out of equilibrium, with active suspensions, such as swimming bacteria in solutions, serving as impactful models. These systems exhibit spatio-temporal patterns akin…
Escherichia coli and other bacteria use rotating helical filaments to swim. Each cell typically has about four filaments, which bundle or disperse depending on the sense of motor rotation. To study the bundling process, we built a…
Chemotactic active particles, such as bacteria and cells, exhibit an adaptive run-and-tumble motion, giving rise to complex emergent behaviors in response to external chemical fields. This motion is generated by the conversion of internal…
Chemotaxis and haptotaxis have been a main theme in the macroscopic study of bacterial and cellular motility. In this work we investigate the influence these processes have on the shape and motility of fast migrating cells. We note that…
Various bacterial strains exhibit colonial branching patterns during growth on poor substrates. These patterns reflect bacterial cooperative self-organization and cybernetic processes of communication, regulation and control employed during…
Swimming bacteria detect chemical gradients by performing temporal comparisons of recent measurements of chemical concentration. These comparisons are described quantitatively by the chemotactic response function, which we expect to…
Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…
Bacteria are able to respond to environmental signals by changing their rules of movement. When we take into account chemical signals in the environment, this behaviour is often called chemotaxis. At the individual-level, chemotaxis…
The chemotaxis pathway in the bacterium Escherichia coli allows cells to detect changes in external ligand concentration (e.g. nutrients). The pathway regulates the flagellated rotary motors and hence the cells' swimming behaviour, steering…
We conducted a three-dimensional numerical simulation of bioconvection generated by oxygen-reactive chemotactic bacteria. This study investigated the bioconvection patterns, interference between plumes, and the wavelength of bioconvection…
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…
We present a generic mechanism by which reproducing microorganisms, with a diffusivity that depends on the local population density, can form stable patterns. It is known that a decrease of swimming speed with density can promote separation…
Mixtures of active and passive particles are predicted to exhibit a variety of nonequilibrium phases. Here we report a dynamic clustering phase in mixtures of colloids and motile bacteria. We show that colloidal clustering results from a…
The near-surface swimming patterns of bacteria are strongly determined by the hydrodynamic interactions between bacteria and the surface, which trap bacteria in smooth circular trajectories that lead to inefficient surface exploration.…
The existence of travelling waves for a model of concentration waves of bacteria is investigated. The model consists in a kinetic equation for the biased motion of cells following a run-and-tumble process, coupled with two…
Biomolecular condensates form by phase separation of biological polymers and have important functions in the cell $-$ functions that are inherently connected to their physical properties. A remarkable aspect of such condensates is that…
Colonies of rod-shaped bacteria constitute a system of colloidal active matter with nematic properties. As a single initial bacterium multiplies through repeated divisions, the resulting colony quickly loses long-range orientational order,…