Browsing by Author "Misbah, C."

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Amoeboid motion in confined geometry
(2015-11-04)
Wu, Hao
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Thiebaud, M.
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Hu, W. -F.
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Farutin, A.
;
Rafai, S.
Many eukaryotic cells undergo frequent shape changes (described as amoeboid motion) that enable them to move forward. We investigate the effect of confinement on a minimal model of amoeboid swimmer. A complex picture emerges: (i) The swimmer's nature (i.e., either pusher or puller) can be modified by confinement, thus suggesting that this is not an intrinsic property of the swimmer. This swimming nature transition stems from intricate internal degrees of freedom of membrane deformation. (ii) The swimming speed might increase with increasing confinement before decreasing again for stronger confinements. (iii) A straight amoeoboid swimmer's trajectory in the channel can become unstable, and ample lateral excursions of the swimmer prevail. This happens for both pusher- and puller-type swimmers. For weak confinement, these excursions are symmetric, while they become asymmetric at stronger confinement, whereby the swimmer is located closer to one of the two walls. In this study, we combine numerical and theoretical analyses.
Analytical study for swimmers in a channel
(2019-12-25)
Farutin, A.
;
Wu, H.
;
Hu, W-F
;
Rafai, S.
;
Peyla, P.
There is an overabundance of microswimmers in nature, including bacteria, algae, mammalian cells and so on. They use flagellum, cilia or global shape changes (amoeboid motion) to move forward. In the presence of confining channels, these swimmers exhibit often non-trivial behaviours, such as accumulation at the wall, navigation and so on, and their swimming speed may be strongly influenced by the geometric confinement. Several numerical studies have reported that the presence of walls either enhances or reduces the swimming speed depending on the nature of the swimmer, and also on the confinement. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analytical explanation of several previously obtained numerical results. We treat the case of amoeboid swimmers and the case of squirmers having either a tangential (the classical situation) or normal velocity prescribed at the swimmer surface (pumper). For amoeboid motion we consider a quasi-circular swimmer which allows us to tackle the problem analytically and to extract the equations of the motion of the swimmer, with several explicit analytical or semi-analytical solutions. It is found that the deformation of the amoeboid swimmer as well as a high enough order effect due to confinement are necessary in order to account for previous numerical results. The analytical theory accounts for several features obtained numerically also for non-deformable swimmers.