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Unicellular organisms exhibit elaborate collective behaviors in response to environmental cues. These behaviors are controlled by complex biochemical networks within individual cells and coordinated through cell-to-cell communication.…
Natural habitats of most living microorganisms are distinguished by a complex structure often formed by a porous medium such as soil. The dynamics and transport properties of motile microorganisms are strongly affected by crowded and…
Collective cell migration lies at the intersection of developmental biology and non-equilibrium physics, where active processes give rise to emergent patterns that are biologically relevant. Here, we investigate dilatational modes--cycles…
We present a simple model that describes the motion of a single chemotactic cell exposed to a traveling wave of the chemoattractant. The model incorporates two types of responses to stimulation by the chemoattractant, i.e., change 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…
We extend the notions of multipole and subsystem symmetries to more general {\it spatially modulated} symmetries. We uncover two instances with exponential and (quasi)-periodic modulations, and provide simple microscopic models in one, two…
Swimming microorganisms can influence the diffusion of passive particles. The effect of this swimmer-particle interaction depends on different properties, such as the hydrodynamic field of the swimmer and the relative sizes of…
Motile eukaryotic cells display distinct modes of migration that often occur within the same cell type. It remains unclear, however, whether transitions between the migratory modes require changes in external conditions, or whether the…
Network-forming organisms, like fungi and slime molds, dynamically reorganize their networks during foraging. The resulting re-routing of resource flows within the organism's network can significantly impact local ecosystems. In current…
Flows over remarkably long distances are crucial to the functioning of many organisms, across all kingdoms of life. Coordinated flows are fundamental to power deformations, required for migration or development, or to spread resources and…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
When the motion of a motile cell is observed closely, it appears erratic, and yet the combination of nonequilibrium forces and surfaces can produce striking examples of organization in microbial systems. While most of our current…
The observed spatio-temporal ciliary beat patterns on multiciliated epithelia are suspected to be the result of self-organizing processes on various levels. Here, we present an abstract epithelium model at the pluricellular level, which…
Phytoplankton are the foundation of aquatic food webs. Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton draw down CO2 at magnitudes equivalent to forests and other terrestrial plants and convert it to organic material that is then consumed by other…
Plasmodium of \emph{Physarum polycephalum} is a single cell visible by unaided eye. On a non-nutrient substrate the plasmodium propagates as a traveling localization, as a compact wave-fragment of protoplasm. The plasmodium-localization…
A ubiquitous observation in cell biology is that diffusion of macromolecules and organelles is anomalous, and a description simply based on the conventional diffusion equation with diffusion constants measured in dilute solution fails. This…
Plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is a single cell visible by unaided eye. During its foraging behaviour the cell spans spatially distributed sources of nutrients with a protoplasmic network. Geometrical structure of the protoplasmic…
Tissue remodelling in diverse developmental contexts require cell shape changes that have been associated with pulsation and flow of the actomyosin cytoskeleton. Here we describe the dynamics of the actomyosin cytoskeleton as a confined…
The normal modes and relaxation rates of weak colloidal gels are investigated in computations employing different models of the hydrodynamic interactions between colloids. The eigenspectrum is computed for freely draining,…
We investigate the collective behavior of motile rods immersed in a monolayer of apolar rods confined between vertically vibrating plates using numerical simulations. We uncover an antidiffusive instability whereby motile rods segregate…