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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Many cells contain non-centrosomal arrays of microtubules (MTs), but the assembly, organisation and function of these arrays are poorly understood. We present the first theoretical model for the non-centrosomal MT cytoskeleton ...

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, ...

It is now well established that nearby beating pairs of eukaryotic flagella or cilia typically synchronize in phase. A substantial body of evidence supports the hypothesis that hydrodynamic coupling between the active ...

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 ...

Efficient uptake of prey and nutrients from the environment is an important component in the fitness of all microorganisms, and its dependence on size may reveal clues to the origins of evolutionary transitions to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Groups of eukaryotic cilia and flagella are capable of coordinating their beating over large scales, routinely exhibiting collective dynamics in the form of metachronal waves. The origin of this behaviour—possibly influenced ...

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 ...

We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows ...

It is known from the wave-like motion of microtubules in motility assays that the piconewton forces that motors produce can be sufficient to bend the filaments. In cellular phenomena such as cytosplasmic streaming, molecular ...

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 ...

Biosilicification (the formation of biological structures from silica) occurs in diverse eukaryotic lineages, plays a major role in global biogeochemical cycles, and has significant biotechnological applications. Silicon ...

Recent studies of cooled oil emulsion droplets uncovered transformations into a host of flattened shapes with straight edges and sharp corners, driven by a partial phase transition of the bulk liquid phase. Here, we explore ...