Related papers: Shaping nematic order in bacterial films with sing…
Bacteria build multicellular communities termed biofilms, which are often encased in a self-secreted extracellular matrix that gives the community mechanical strength and protection against harsh chemicals. How bacteria assemble distinct…
The dynamics of cellular aggregates is driven by the interplay of mechanochemical processes and cellular activity. Although deterministic models may capture mechanical features, local chemical fluctuations trigger random cell responses,…
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…
Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…
A diffusion-reaction model for the growth of bacterial colonies is presented. The often observed cooperative behavior developed by bacteria which increases their motility in adverse growth conditions is here introduced as a nonlinear…
Biofilms are antibiotic-resistant bacterial aggregates that grow on moist surfaces and can trigger hospital-acquired infections. They provide a classical example in biology where the dynamics of cellular communities may be observed and…
We show that "dry" active nematics, e.g. collections of shaken elongated granular particles, exhibit large-scale spatiotemporal chaos made of interacting dense, ordered, band-like structures in a parameter region including the linear onset…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
We use linear stability analysis to show that an isotropic phase of elongated particles with dipolar flow fields can develop nematic order as a result of their activity. We argue that ordering is favoured if the particles are flow-aligning…
We present a combined numerical and analytical study of pattern formation in an active system where particles align, possess a density-dependent motility, and are subject to a logistic reaction. This is a model for suspensions of…
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…
We study the phase ordering colloids suspended in a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal below the clearing point Tni and the resulting aggregated structure. Small (150nm) PMMA particles are dispersed in a classical liquid crystal matrix,…
Both uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals are defined by orientational ordering of their building blocks. While uniaxial nematics only orient the long molecular axis, biaxial order implies local order along three axes. As the…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
We study the vertex model for epithelial tissue mechanics extended to include coupling between the cell shapes and tensions in cell-cell junctions. This coupling represents an active force which drives the system out of equilibrium and…
Motile bacteria can migrate along chemical gradients in a process known as chemotaxis. When exposed to uniform environmental stress, Escherichia coli cells coordinate their chemotactic responses to form millimeter-sized condensates…
A nematic membrane is a sheet with embedded orientational order, which can occur in biological cells, liquid crystal films, manufactured materials, and other soft matter systems. By formulating the free energy of nematic films using tensor…
The transition from monolayers to multilayered structures in bacterial colonies is a fundamental step in biofilm development. Observed across different morphotypes and species, this transition is triggered within freely growing bacterial…
It has recently been reported that bacteria, such as E.coli and P. putida, perform distinct modes of motion when placed in porous media as compared to dilute regions or free space. This has led us to suggest an efficient strategy for active…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…