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A model for the effects of germanium on silica biomineralization in choanoflagellates
(Royal Society PublishingJournal of the Royal Society Interface, 2016-09-21)
Silica biomineralization is a widespread phenomenon of major biotechnological interest. Modifying biosilica with substances like germanium (Ge) can confer useful new properties, although exposure to high levels of Ge ...
Aerotaxis in the closest relatives of animals
(eLife Sciences Publications LtdeLife, 2016-11-24)
As the closest unicellular relatives of animals, choanoflagellates serve as useful model organisms for understanding the evolution of animal multicellularity. An important factor in animal evolution was the increasing ocean ...
Fluid dynamics at the scale of the cell
(Cambridge University PressJournal of Fluid Mechanics, 2016-10-17)
The world of cellular biology provides us with many fascinating fluid dynamical phenomena that lie at the heart of physiology, development, evolution and ecology. Advances in imaging, micromanipulation and microfluidics ...
Long-range interactions, wobbles, and phase defects in chains of model cilia
(American Physical SoceityPhysical Review Fluids, 2016-12-13)
Eukaryotic cilia and flagella are chemo-mechanical oscillators capable of generating long-range coordinated motions known as metachronal waves. Pair synchronization is a fundamental requirement for these collective dynamics, ...
Motility of Colonial Choanoflagellates and the Statistics of Aggregate Random Walkers
(American Physical SocietyPhysical Review Letters, 2016-01-22)
We illuminate the nature of the three-dimensional random walks of microorganisms composed of individual organisms adhered together. Such aggregate random walkers are typified by choanoflagellates, eukaryotes that are the ...
Coordinated Beating of Algal Flagella is Mediated by Basal Coupling
(National Academy of SciencesProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2016)
Cilia and flagella often exhibit synchronized behavior; this includes phase-locking, as seen in Chlamydomonas, and metachronal wave formation in the respiratory cilia of higher organisms. Since the observations by Gray and ...
Squirmers with swirl - a model for Volvox swimming
(Cambridge University PressJournal of Fluid Mechanics, 2016)
Colonies of the green alga Volvox are spheres that swim through the beating of pairs of flagella on their surface somatic cells. The somatic cells themselves are mounted rigidly in a polymeric extracellular matrix, fixing ...
Ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic order in bacterial vortex lattices
(Nature Publishing GroupNature Physics, 2016-01-04)
Despite their inherently non-equilibrium nature [1] , living systems can self-organize in highly ordered collective states [2,3] that share striking similarities with the thermodynamic equilibrium phases [4,5] of conventional ...
Directed collective motion of bacteria under channel confinement
(Institute of PhysicsNew Journal of Physics, 2016-07-01)
Dense suspensions of swimming bacteria are known to exhibit collective behaviour arising from the
interplay of steric and hydrodynamic interactions. Unconfined suspensions exhibit transient,
recurring vortices and jets, ...
Instabilities and Solitons in Minimal Strips
(American Physical SocietyPhysical Review Letters, 2016-07-01)
We show that highly twisted minimal strips can undergo a nonsingular transition, unlike the singular transitions seen in the Möbius strip and the catenoid. If the strip is nonorientable, this transition is topologically ...