Related papers: Is E. coli good at chemotaxis?
Although the motility of the flagellated bacteria, Escherichia coli, has been widely studied, the effect of viscosity on swimming speed remains controversial. The swimming mode of wild-type E.coli is often idealized as a "run-and- tumble"…
Understanding the system level adaptive changes taking place in an organism in response to variations in the environment is a key issue of contemporary biology. Current modeling approaches such as the constraint-based flux balance analyses…
Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…
Many phenomena in biology involve both reactions and chemotaxis. These processes can clearly influence each other, and chemotaxis can play an important role in sustaining and speeding up the reaction. In continuation of our earlier work, we…
Biological systems are promising substrates for computation because they naturally process environmental information through complex internal dynamics. In this study, we investigate whether bacterial metabolic models can act as physical…
We perform stability analysis of a kinetic bacterial chemotaxis model of bacterial self-organization, assuming that bacteria respond sharply to chemical signals. The resulting discontinuous tumbling kernel represents the key challenge for…
This study explores the use of optical speckle tweezers (ST) to manipulate the motility of Escherichia coli bacteria. By employing the generated speckle patterns, we demonstrate the ability to control bacterial dynamics through optical…
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…
Self-sustained turbulent structures have been observed in a wide range of living fluids, yet no quantitative theory exists to explain their properties. We report experiments on active turbulence in highly concentrated 3D suspensions of…
Enzymes have been recently proposed to have mechanical activity associated with their chemical activity. In a number of recent studies, it has been reported that enzymes undergo enhanced diffusion in the presence of their corresponding…
The Escherichia coli chemotaxis signaling pathway has served as a model system for studying the adaptive sensing of environmental signals by large protein complexes. The chemoreceptors control the kinase activity of CheA in response to the…
We consider self-propelled particles undergoing run-and-tumble dynamics (as exhibited by E. coli) in one dimension. Building on previous analyses at drift-diffusion level for the one-particle density, we add both interactions and noise,…
This article presents a physical biology approach to understanding organization and segregation of bacterial chromosomes. The author uses a "piston" analogy for bacterial chromosomes in a cell, which leads to a phase diagram for the…
We present a Brownian dynamics simulation of the bacterial Stirling engine studied by Krishnamurthy et al., Nat. Phys. 12, 1134 (2016). In their experimental setup, an overdamped colloid in an optical trap with time-modulated stiffness…
The Brownian dynamics of a single microorganism coupled by chemotaxis to a diffusing concentration field which is secreted by the microorganism itself is studied by computer simulations in spatial dimensions $d=1,2,3$. Both cases of a…
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single cells to demographic scales, a…
Autologous chemotaxis, in which cells secrete and detect molecules to determine the direction of fluid flow, is thwarted at high cell density because molecules from other cells interfere with a given cell's signal. Using a minimal model of…
Chemical reactions can be induced at a distance due to the propagation of electromagnetic signals during intermediate chemical stages. Although it is well known at optical frequencies, e.g. photosynthetic reactions, electromagnetic signals…
Microorganisms like bacteria can sense concentration of chemo-attractants in its medium very accurately. They achieve this through interaction between the receptors on their cell surface and the chemo-attractant molecules (like sugar). But…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…