Related papers: Diffusion of Tracer Particles in Early Growing Bio…
Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…
We study the behavior of a tracer particle driven by a one-dimensional fluctuating potential, defined initially as a Brownian motion, and evolving in time according to the heat equation. We obtain two main results. First, in the short time…
Biofilms are bacterial aggregates encased in a self-produced polymeric matrix which attach to moist surfaces and are extremely resistant to chemicals and antibiotics. Recent experiments show that their structure is defined by the interplay…
We examine theoretically the spreading of a viscous liquid drop over a thin film of uniform thickness, assuming the liquid's viscosity is regulated by the concentration of a solute that is carried passively by the spreading flow. The solute…
The spatial organization of bacteria in dense biofilms is key to their collective behaviour, and understanding it will be important for medical and technological applications. Here we study the morphology of a compact biofilm that undergoes…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…
Experimental studies of systems containing active proteins that undergo conformational changes driven by catalytic chemical reactions have shown that the diffusion coefficients of passive tracer particles and active molecules are larger…
Recent progresses in single particle tracking have shown evidences of non-Gaussian distribution of displacements in living cells, both near the cellular membrane and inside the cytoskeleton. A similar behavior has also been observed in…
We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…
A stochastic model is used to assess the effect of external parameters on the development of submerged biofilms on smooth and rough surfaces. The model includes basic cellular mechanisms, such as division and spreading, together with an…
Bacteria invade surfaces by forming dense colonies encased in a polymer matrix. Successful settlement of founder bacteria, early microcolony development and later macroscopic spreading of these biofilms on surfaces rely on complex physical…
Many organisms form colonies for a transient period of time to withstand environmental pressure. Bacterial biofilms are a prototypical example of such behavior. Despite significant interest across disciplines, physical mechanisms governing…
Tracer diffusion in crowded environments is central to many biological and soft matter systems, but quantitative frameworks for linking tracer motion to environmental structure remain limited. Here, we study the transport of rigid tracers…
A rapidly increasing number of systems is identified in which the stochastic motion of tracer particles follows the Brownian law $\langle\mathbf{r}^2(t) \rangle\simeq Dt$ yet the distribution of particle displacements is strongly…
Brownian motion is widely used as a paradigmatic model of diffusion in equilibrium media throughout the physical, chemical, and biological sciences. However, many real world systems, particularly biological ones, are intrinsically…
Background: This study is mainly motivated by the need of understanding how the diffusion behaviour of a biomolecule (or even of a larger object) is affected by other moving macromolecules, organelles, and so on, inside a living cell,…
Single-file diffusion is a theoretically challenging many-body problem where the calculation of even the simplest observables, e.g. mean square displacement, for a tracer particle requires a heavy mathematical machinery. There is therefore…
We study the effective diffusion constant of a Brownian particle linearly coupled to a thermally fluctuating scalar field. We use a path integral method to compute the effective diffusion coefficient perturbatively to lowest order in the…
Equations for dislocation evolution bridge the gap between dislocation properties and continuum descriptions of plastic behavior of crystalline materials. Computer simulations can help us verify these evolution equations and find their…
Bacillus subtilis biofilms were grown in laminar channel flow at wall shear stress spanning one order of magnitude ($\tau_w = 0.068$ Pa to $\tau_w = 0.67$ Pa). We monitor, non-invasively, the evolution of the three-dimensional distribution…