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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…
Flagellar motility is critical to natural and many forms of assisted reproduction. Rhythmic beating and wave propagation by the flagellum propels sperm through fluid and enables modulation between penetrative progressive motion, activated…
We study the onset of spontaneous dynamics in the follower force model of an active filament, wherein a slender elastic filament in a viscous liquid is clamped normal to a wall at one end and subjected to a tangential compressive force at…
During the past century, biologists and mathematicians investigated two mechanisms underlying bacteria motion: the run phase during which bacteria move in straight lines and the tumble phase in which they change their orientation. When…
Propagating spiral waves have been discovered in various chemical, biological and physical systems. Spiral waves in multicellular organisms are often associated with essential living functions. Although certain eukaryotic microorganisms…
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…
We experimentally study the emergence of collective bacterial swimming, a phenomenon often referred to as bacterial turbulence. A phase diagram of the flow of 3D E. coli suspensions spanned by bacterial concentration, the swimming speed of…
Models based on surfactant driven instabilities have been employed to describe pattern formation by swarming bacteria. However, by definition, such models cannot account for the effect of bacterial sensing and decision making. Here we…
The presence of a nearby boundary is likely to be important in the life cycle and evolution of motile flagellate bacteria. This has led many authors to employ numerical simulations to model near-surface bacterial motion and compute…
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…
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…
We present a simplified theory for semiflexible flagella under the action of a traveling-wave perturbation that emulates the organized active forces generated by molecular motors, capable of inducing beating patterns to the filament. By…
We discuss a two-dimensional model for the dynamics of axonemal deformations driven by internally generated forces of molecular motors. Our model consists of an elastic filament pair connected by active elements. We derive the dynamic…
Transport of microscopic objects across biological membranes usually involves membrane deformation to enclose the object followed by detachment of the engulfed particle. However, in artificial membranes, this last topological remodelling…
Biological filaments such as DNA or bacterial flagella are typically curved in their natural states. To elucidate the interplay of viscous drag, twisting, and bending in the overdamped dynamics of such filaments, we compute the steady-state…
Buckling instabilities driven by tissue growth underpin key developmental events such as the folding of the brain. Tissue growth is disordered due to cell-to-cell variability, but the effects of this variability on buckling are unknown.…
We investigate the physics of an optically-driven micromotor of biological origin. A single, live red blood cell, when placed in an optical trap folds into a rod-like shape. If the trapping laser beam is circularly polarized, the folded RBC…
The behavior of fluid interfaces far from equilibrium plays central roles in nature and in industry. Active swimmers trapped at interfaces can alter transport at fluid boundaries with far reaching implications. Swimmers can become trapped…
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…
In this Supporting information we provide background information on our model of the bacterial flagellar motor. We also derive the analytical solution of our coarse-grained model of the switching dynamics and explain the hybrid stochastic…