Related papers: Is E. coli good at chemotaxis?
Multicellular chemotaxis can occur via individually chemotaxing cells that are mechanically coupled. Alternatively, it can emerge collectively, from cells chemotaxing differently in a group than they would individually. Here we consider…
Culturing cells confined in microscale geometries has been reported in many studies this last decade, in particular following the development of microfluidic-based applications and lab-on-a-chip devices. Such studies usually examine growth…
Densely packed, motile bacteria can adopt collective states not seen in conventional, passive materials. These states remain in many ways mysterious, and their physical characterization can aid our understanding of natural bacterial…
Enhanced diffusion and anti-chemotaxis of enzymes have been reported in several experiments in the last decade, opening up entirely new avenues of research in the bio-nanosciences both at the applied and fundamental level. Here, we…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
Eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients in a wide range of environments. We show that, if a cell is exposed to a highly variable environment, it may gain chemotactic accuracy by expressing multiple receptor types with varying…
Hypothesis: Bacterial contamination of surfaces poses a major threat to public health. Designing effective antibacterial or self-cleaning surfaces requires understanding how bacteria-laden droplets interact with solid substrates and how…
The short-time dynamics of bacterial chromosomal loci is a mixture of subdiffusive and active motion, in the form of rapid relocations with near-ballistic dynamics. While previous work has shown that such rapid motions are ubiquitous, we…
We study the migration of chemotactic wild-type Escherichia coli populations in semisolid (soft) agar in the concentration range C = 0.15-0.5% (w/v). For C < 0.35%, expanding bacterial colonies display characteristic chemotactic rings. At C…
The design of biological networks using bacteria as the basic elements of the network is initially motivated by a phenomenon called quorum sensing. Through quorum sensing, each bacterium performs sensing the medium and communicating it to…
Biological systems like ciliated microorganisms are capable to respond to the external chemical gradients, a process known as chemotaxis which has been studied here using the chiral squirmer model. This theoretical model considers the…
Chemotactic bacteria have been observed to congregate into highly regular patterns. When the bacteria are placed in the center of a dish, a wave of bacteria can travel outward, leaving a regular pattern of spots or stripes in its wake.…
We study the transport of bacteria in a porous media modeled by a square channel containing one cylindrical obstacle via molecular dynamics simulations coupled to a lattice Boltzmann fluid. Our bacteria model is a rod-shaped rigid body…
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…
In this paper the first equation within a class of well known chemotaxis systems is derived as a hydrodynamic limit from a stochastic interacting many particle system on the lattice. The cells are assumed to interact with attractive…
Molecular communication is an expanding body of research. Recent advances in biology have encouraged using genetically engineered bacteria as the main component in the molecular communication. This has stimulated a new line of research that…
Self-propelled bacteria are marvels of nature with a potential to power dynamic materials and microsystems of the future. The challenge is in commanding their chaotic behavior. By dispersing swimming Bacillus subtilis in a…
We use in vivo measurements of swimming bacteria in an optical trap to determine fundamental properties of bacterial propulsion. In particular, we determine the propulsion matrix, which relates the angular velocity of the flagellum to the…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
We study a synthetic system of motile Escherichia coli bacteria encapsulated inside giant lipid vesicles. Forces exerted by the bacteria on the inner side of the membrane are sufficient to extrude membrane tubes filled with one or several…