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Noise plays a crucial role in the regulation of cellular and organismal function and behavior. Exploring noise's impact is key to understanding fundamental biological processes, such as gene expression, signal transduction, and the…
Flocks of birds and schools of fish are familiar examples of spatial patterns formed by living organisms. In contrast to the patterns on the skins of, say, zebra and giraffe, the patterns of our interest are {\it transient} although…
Most cells possess the capacity to locomote. Alone or collectively, this allows them to adapt, to rearrange, and to explore their surroundings. The biophysical characterization of such motile processes, in health and disease, has so far…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
Swarming of animal groups enthralls scientists in fields ranging from biology to physics to engineering. Complex swarming patterns often arise from simple interactions between individuals to the benefit of the collective whole. The…
Nature offers remarkable examples of complex photonic architectures such as those responsible for the iridescent colors of butterfly wings that emerge spontaneously during growth, well before any centralized control takes place. Arising…
Certain flow structures trap active microorganisms over extended periods, impacting mortality and growth by inhibiting foraging, exploration, and predator evasion. We show that transport barriers and trapping of a microswimmer in unsteady…
As motivated by studies of cellular motility driven by spatiotemporal chemotactic gradients in microdevices, we develop a framework for constructing approximate analytical solutions for the location, speed and cellular densities for cell…
Synaptic plasticity is metabolically expensive, yet animals continuously update their internal models without exhausting energy reserves. However, when artificial neural networks are trained, the network parameters are typically updated on…
The behavior of living systems is based on the experience they gained through their interactions with the environment [1]. This experience is stored in the complex biochemical networks of cells and organisms to provide a relationship…
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…
Recent advances in techniques for monitoring and perturbing neural populations have greatly enhanced our ability to study circuits in the brain. In particular, two-photon holographic optogenetics now enables precise photostimulation of…
Bacterial chemotaxis in Escherichia coli is a canonical system for the study of signal transduction. A remarkable feature of this system is the coexistence of precise adaptation in population with large fluctuating cellular behavior in…
Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…
Diatoms are among the dominant phytoplankters in the worl's ocean, and their external silica investments, resembling artificial photonics crystal, are expected to play an active role in light manipulation. Digital holography allowed…
Self-generated gradients (SGG) provide robust steering cues that guide cells in their long-distance expeditions during embryonic development, immune response, and cancer metastasis. Cells generate their own local, dynamic gradients by…
Living organisms rely on molecular networks, such as gene circuits and signaling pathways, for information processing and robust decision-making in crowded, noisy environments. Recent advances show that interacting biomolecules…
Cellular locomotion often involves the motion of thin, elastic filaments, such as cilia and flagella, in viscous environments. The manuscript serves as a general introduction to the topic of modelling microscale elastohydrodynamics. We…
The motility skills of phytoplankton have evolved and persisted over millions of years, primarily in response to factors such as nutrient and light availability, temperature and viscosity gradients, turbulence, and predation pressure.…
Interacting particle system (IPS) models have proven to be highly successful for describing the spatial movement of organisms. However, it has proven challenging to infer the interaction rules directly from data. In the field of equation…