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Active turbulence arises typically in systems ranging from microorganisms and biopolymers to synthetic colloids, where chaotic flows are closely associated with motile topological defects in collectively swarming suspensions. Here, we…
Collective motion of cells is critical to some of the most vital tasks including wound healing, development, and immune response [Friedl and Gilmour 2009; Tokarski et al. 2012; Lee et al. 2012; Beltman et al. 2009], and is common to many…
Our knowledge of how individual cells self-organize to form complex multicellular systems is being revolutionized by a data outburst, coming from high-throughput experimental breakthroughs such as single-cell RNA sequencing and spatially…
In complex systems, groups of interacting objects may form prevalent and persistent spatiotemporal patterns, which we refer to as motifs. These motifs can exhibit features that reveal how individual objects interact with one another.…
The quest for the optimal navigation strategy in a complex environment is at the heart of microswimmer applications like cargo carriage or drug targeting to cancer cells. Here, we formulate a variational Fermat's principle for microswimmers…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
Ciliated microswimmers and flagellated bacteria alter their swimming trajectories to follow the direction of an applied electric field exhibiting electrotaxis. Both for matters of application and physical modelling, it is instructive to…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
Interactions between swimming cells and surfaces are essential to many microbiological processes, from bacterial biofilm formation to human fertilization. However, in spite of their fundamental importance, relatively little is known about…
Chemotactic cells establish cell polarity in the absence of external guidance cues. Such self-organized polarity is induced by spontaneous symmetry breaking in the intracellular activities, which produces an emergent memory effect…
Adaptive control in biological systems, such as intestinal immunity, remains poorly understood despite detailed knowledge of underlying regulatory networks. We propose an alternative framework based on stochastic martingale turnover, in…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
The transport of motile entities across modulated energy landscapes plays an important role in a range of phenomena in biology, colloidal science and solid-state physics. Here, an easily implementable strategy that allows for the collective…
A suspension of gyrotactic microalgae Chlamydomonas augustae swimming in a cylindrical water vessel in solid-body rotation is studied. Our experiments show that swimming algae form an aggregate around the axis of rotation, whose intensity…
Numerous cell-types have shown a remarkable ability to detect and move along gradients in stiffness of an underlying substrate -- a process known as durotaxis. The mechanisms underlying durotaxis are still unresolved, but generally believed…
Pristine coastal shallow systems are usually dominated by extensive meadows of seagrass species, which are assumed to take advantage of nutrient supply from sediment. An increasing nutrient input is thought to favour phytoplankton,…
The large scale behaviour of a population of cells that grow and interact through the concentration field of the chemicals they secrete is studied using dynamical renormalization group methods. The combination of the effective long-range…
The ability to navigate in complex, inhomogeneous environments is fundamental to survival at all length scales, giving rise to the rapid development of various subfields in bio-locomotion such as the well established concept of chemotaxis.…
The unicellular biflagellate green alga {\it Chlamydomonas reinhardtii} has been an important model system in biology for decades, and in recent years it has started to attract growing attention also within the biophysics community. Here we…
Image-goal navigation is a challenging task, as it requires the agent to navigate to a target indicated by an image in a previously unseen scene. Current methods introduce diverse memory mechanisms which save navigation history to solve…