Related papers: Confinement controls bacterial spreading at all sc…
Swimming microbes, such as bacteria and algae, live in diverse habitats including soil, ocean and human body which are characterized by structural boundaries and heterogeneous fluid flows. Although much progress has been made in…
The spatiotemporal oscillation patterns of the proteins MinD and MinE are used by the bacterium E. coli to sense its own geometry. Strikingly, both computer simulations and experiments have recently shown that for the same geometry of the…
Motility is fundamental to the survival and proliferation of microorganisms. The E. coli bacterium propels itself using a bundle of rotating helical flagella. If one flagellum reverses its rotational direction, it leaves the bundle,…
Microswimmers such as E. Coli bacteria accumulate and exhibit an intriguing dynamics near walls, governed by hydrodynamic and steric interactions. Insight into the underlying mechanisms and predominant interactions demand a detailed…
The dynamics of growth of bacterial populations has been extensively studied for planktonic cells in well-agitated liquid culture, in which all cells have equal access to nutrients. In the real world, bacteria are more likely to live in…
Dynamics simulations of constrained particles can greatly aid in understanding the temporal and spatial evolution of biological processes such as lateral transport along membranes and self-assembly of viruses. Most theoretical efforts in…
When transported in confined geometries rigid fibers show interesting transport dynamics induced by friction with the top and bottom walls. Fiber flexibility causes an additional coupling between fiber deformation and transport and is…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…
Motivated by subdiffusive motion of bio-molecules observed in living cells we study the stochastic properties of a non-Brownian particle whose motion is governed by either fractional Brownian motion or the fractional Langevin equation and…
Confinement can be used to systematically tame turbulent dynamics occurring in active fluids. Although periodic channels are the simplest geometries to study confinement numerically, the corresponding experimental realizations require…
Describing the diffusion of particles through crowded, confined environments with which they can interact is of considerable biological and technological interest. Under conditions where the confinement dimensions become comparable to the…
The diffusion of active microscopic organisms in complex environments plays an important role in a wide range of biological phenomena from cell colony growth to single organism transport. Here, we investigate theoretically and…
In the present work we simulate the basic two-dimensional dynamics of swarming E. coli bacteria on the surface of a moderately soft agar plate. Individual bacteria are modelled by self-propelled ridged bodies (agents), which interact with…
Microbes thrive in diverse porous environments -- from soil and riverbeds to human lungs and cancer tissues -- spanning multiple scales and conditions. Short- to long-term fluctuations in local factors induce spatio-temporal…
Motile bacteria are known to accumulate at surfaces, eventually leading to changes in bacterial motility and bio-film formation. We use a novel two-colour, three-dimensional Lagrangian tracking technique, to follow simultaneously the body…
Diffusive transport of small molecules within the internal structures of biological and synthetic material systems is complex because the crowded environment presents chemical and physical barriers to mobility. We explored this mobility…
We analyze a dilute suspension of active particles confined between walls and subjected to fields that can modulate particle speed as well as orientation. Generally, the particle distribution is different in the bulk compared to near the…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single cells to demographic scales, a…
Recent advances in microscopy techniques has uncovered unique aspects of flagella-driven motility in bacteria. A remarkable example is the discovery of flagellar wrapping, a phenomenon whereby a bacterium wraps its flagellum (or flagellar…