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Many living and physical systems such as cell aggregates, tissues or bacterial colonies behave as unconventional systems of particles that are strongly constrained by volume exclusion and shape interactions. Understanding how these…
P. polycephalum may be considered as a spatially represented parallel unconventional computing substrate, but how can this `computer' be programmed? In this paper we examine and catalogue individual low-level mechanisms which may be used to…
The collective migration of epithelial groups of cells plays a central role in processes such as embryo development, wound healing, and cancer invasion. While finite cell clusters are known to collectively migrate in response to external…
Social animals have to take into consideration the behaviour of conspecifics when making decisions to go by their daily lives. These decisions affect their fitness and there is therefore an evolutionary pressure to try making the right…
The amoeboid organism, the plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum, behaves on the basis of spatio-temporal pattern formation by local contraction-oscillators. This biological system can be regarded as a reaction-diffusion system which has…
Animals must constantly make decisions on the move, such as when choosing among multiple options, or "targets", in space. Recent evidence suggests that this results from a recursive feedback between the (vectorial) neural representation of…
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
Trypanosoma brucei (T. brucei), a single-celled parasite and natural microswimmer, is responsible for fatal sleeping sickness in infected mammals, including humans. Understanding how T. brucei interacts with fluid environments and navigates…
Suspensions of motile microorganisms can spontaneously form large-scale fluid motion, known as bioconvection, characterized by dense downwelling plumes separated by broad upwelling regions. In this study, we investigate bioconvection in…
Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…
Using numerical simulations, we examine the nonlinear dynamics of skyrmions driven over random pinning. For weak pinning, the skyrmions depin elastically, retaining sixfold ordering; however, at the onset of motion there is a dip in the…
In recent years the functionality of synthetic active microparticles has edged even closer to that of their biological counterparts. However, we still lack the understanding needed to recreate at the microscale key features of autonomous…
We study the spatial patterns formed by a system of interacting particles where the mobility of any individual is determined by the population crowding at two different spatial scales. In this way we model the behavior of some biological…
Animal locomotion is often subject to constraints arising from anatomical/physiological asymmetries. We use the nematode C.~elegans as a minimal model system to ask whether such constraints might shape locomotion patterns optimized during…
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
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…
Understanding the role of self-propulsion on the conformational properties of active filamentous objects has relevance in biology. In this context, we consider a flexible bead-spring model polymer for which along with both attractive and…
Plasmodium of \emph{Physarum polycephalum} is a single huge (visible by naked eye) cell with myriad of nuclei. The plasmodium is a promising substrate for non-classical, nature-inspired, computing devices. It is capable for approximation of…
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…
Tracking experiments in dense biological tissues reveal a diversity of sources f or local energy injection at the cell scale. The effect of cell motility has been largely studied, but much less is known abo ut the effect of the observed…