Related papers: A shear-induced limit on bacterial surface adhesio…
Soft surfaces, spanning vastly different environmental and biomedical settings, are frequently colonised by surface-associated bacteria. Yet, how soft surfaces govern bacterial dynamics and their self-organisation into colonies remains…
Motivated by the reported peculiar dynamics of a red blood cell in shear flow, we develop an analytical theory for the motion of a nearly--spherical fluid particle enclosed by a visco--elastic incompressible interface in linear flows. The…
Motivated by the dynamics of microbubbles near catalytic surfaces in bubble-powered microrockets, we consider theoretically the growth of a free spherical bubble near a flat no-slip surface in a Stokes flow. The flow at the bubble surface…
Adhesion of bacteria to liquid-liquid interfaces can play a role in the biodegradation of dispersed hydrocarbons and in biochemical and bioprocess engineering. Whereas thermodynamic factors underpinning adhesion are well studied, the role…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is important across biology, physics, and materials science. Although usually studied at equilibrium, active components - such as motor proteins, enzymes, and synthetic microswimmers - are increasingly…
Stability of coarse particles against gravity is an important issue in dense suspensions (fresh concrete, foodstuff, etc.). On the one hand, it is known that they are stable at rest when the interstitial paste has a high enough yield…
Buckling induced by viscous flow changes the shape of sheet-like nanomaterial particles suspended in liquids. This instability at the particle scale affects collective behavior of suspension flows and has many technological and biological…
Incorporating the inherent heterogeneity of living systems into models of active nematics is essential to provide a more realistic description of biological processes such as bacterial growth, cell dynamics and tissue development.…
Multiphase shear flows often show banded structures that affect the global behavior of complex fluids e.g. in microdevices. Here we investigate numerically the banding of emulsions, i.e. the formation of regions of high and low volume…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
Active fluids made of powered suspended particles have unique abilities to self-generate flow and density structures. How such dynamics can be triggered and leveraged by external cues is a key question of both biological and applied…
The bacterium {\em Bacilus subtilis} frequently forms biofilms at the interface between the culture medium and the air. We develop a mathematical model that couples a description of bacteria as individual discrete objects to the standard…
Understanding mixing and transport of passive scalars in active fluids is important to many natural (e.g. algal blooms) and industrial (e.g. biofuel, vaccine production) processes. Here, we study the mixing of a passive scalar (dye) in…
Chemotaxis of the bacterium Escherichia coli is well understood in shallow chemical gradients, but its swimming behavior remains difficult to interpret in steep gradients. By focusing on single-cell trajectories from simulations, we…
The role of activity on the hydrodynamic dispersion of bacteria in a model porous medium is studied by tracking thousands of bacteria in a microfluidic chip containing randomly placed pillars. We first evaluate the spreading dynamics of two…
We present an analytical calculation of the hydrodynamic interaction between two spherical particles near an elastic interface such as a cell membrane. The theory predicts the frequency dependent self- and pair-mobilities accounting for the…
We grafted polyacrylic acid brushes containing cysteine side chains at a defined surface density on planar lipid membranes. Specular X-ray reflectivity data indicated that the addition of Cd2+ ions induces the compaction of the polymer…
A fundamental step in the race to design a rapid diagnostic test for antimicrobial resistance is the separation of bacteria from their matrix. Many recent studies have been focused on the development of systems capable of separating and…
Thermodynamics tells us to expect underwater contact between two hydrophobic surfaces to result in stronger adhesion compared to two hydrophilic surfaces. However, presence of water changes not only energetics, but also the dynamic process…
Eukaryotic cell motility is crucial during development, wound healing, the immune response, and cancer metastasis. Some eukaryotic cells can swim, but cells more commonly adhere to and crawl along the extracellular matrix. We study the…