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The migration of a suspended vesicle in an unbounded Poiseuille flow is investigated numerically in the low Reynolds number limit. We consider the situation without viscosity contrast between the interior of the vesicle and the exterior.…
The aim of this work is to quantify the spatio-temporal dynamics of flow-driven amoeboid locomotion in small ($\sim$100 $\mu$m) fragments of the true slime mold \phys {\it polycephalum}. In this model organism, cellular contraction drives…
A growing body of work aims at designing and testing micron-scale synthetic swimmers. One method, inspired by the locomotion of flagellated bacteria, consists of applying a rotating magnetic field to a rigid, helically-shaped, propeller…
Several micro-organisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, use flagella or cilia to swim in a fluid, while many other micro-organisms instead use ample shape deformation, described as amoeboid, to propel themselves by either crawling…
Suspensions of motile cells are model systems for understanding the unique mechanical properties of living materials which often consist of ensembles of self-propelled particles. We present here a quantitative comparison of theory against…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
Motivated by strategies for targeted microfluidic transport of droplets, we investigate how sessile droplets can be steered toward a preferred direction using travelling waves in substrate wettability or deformations of the substrate. To…
We demonstrate with a nonlinear MHD code that angular momentum can be transported due to the magnetic instability of toroidal fields under the influence of differential rotation, and that the resulting effective viscosity may be high enough…
Particles such as microplastics and phytoplankton suspended in the water column in the natural environment are often subject to the action of surface gravity waves. By modelling such anisotropic particles as small spheroids that slowly…
The hydrodynamic interactions among bacterial cell bodies, flagella, and surrounding boundaries are essential for understanding bacterial motility in complex environments. In this study, we demonstrate that each slender flagellum can be…
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…
Drosophila melanogaster hemocytes are highly motile cells that are crucial for successful embryogenesis and have important roles in the organism's immunological response. Hemocyte motion was measured using selective plane illumination…
It is often desirable to enhance the motility of active nano- or microscale swimmers such as, e.g., self-propelled Janus particles as agents of chemical reactions or weak sperm cells for better chances of successful fertilization. Here we…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion depending on the environment in which they find themselves. One mode is swimming by blebbing or other shape changes, and in this paper we analyze a class of…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
The bacterial flagellar motor is a highly efficient rotary machine used by many bacteria to propel themselves. It has recently been shown that at low speeds its rotation proceeds in steps [Sowa et al. (2005) Nature 437, 916--919]. Here we…
We show that the flagellar beat of bull spermatozoa and Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii can be modelled by a minimal, geometrically nonlinear reaction-diffusion system. Model solutions are spatio-temporally animated patterns describing flagellar…
The Ophiuchus stellar stream presents a puzzle due to its complicated morphology, with a substructure perpendicular to the main track (spur), a broadened tail (fanning), and a shorter than expected angular extent given its old stellar…
Eukaryotic swimming cells such as spermatozoa, algae or protozoa use flagella or cilia to move in viscous fluids. The motion of their flexible appendages in the surrounding fluid induces propulsive forces that balance with the viscous drag…
The dynamics of fluid vesicles is studied under flow in microchannels, in which the width varies periodically along the channel. Three types of flow instabilities of prolate vesicles are found. For small quasi-spherical vesicles -- compared…