SKM 2023 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 9: Active Matter III (joint session BP/CPP/DY)
BP 9.1: Talk
Tuesday, March 28, 2023, 09:30–09:45, TOE 317
Gliding motility and reorientation of flagellated microbes on curved surfaces — •Alexandros Fragkopoulos1, Nicolas Fares1,2, and Oliver Bäumchen1 — 1University of Bayreuth, Experimental Physics V, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany — 2University of Bordeaux, CNRS, LOMA, UMR 5798, 33400 Talence, France
The model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a unicellular biflagellated microalga, can adhere and colonize almost any surface under particular light conditions. Once the cells attach to a surface, an intraflagellar transport machinery translocates the cell body along the flagella, which are oriented in a 180∘ configuration. This motion is known as gliding motility. Even though the cells firmly adhere to surfaces, they are able to reorient through different physical mechanisms [1]. With the use of the orientation autocorrelation function, we find that cells exhibit large reorientation events shortly after their initial attachment to a surface, while at longer time scales they are primarily constrained to 1D motion. On cylindrical surfaces, the large reoriations cause the cells to predominantely align in the direction of the minimum principle curvature. We quantify the curvature-induced alignment using the nematic order parameter and reveal that the minimum surface curvature required for cell alignment is comparable to the static flagella curvature.
[1] S. Till, et al., Phys. Rev. Res., (Accepted)