The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms

By Eric Lauga, T. Powers. 2008

2,311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cell motility in viscous fluids is ubiquitous and affects many biological processes, including reproduction, infection and the marine life ecosystem. Here we review the biophysical and mechanical principles of locomotion at the small scales relevant to cell swimming, tens of micrometers and below. At this scale, inertia is unimportant and the Reynolds number is small. Our emphasis is on the simple physical picture and fundamental flow physics phenomena in this regime. We first give a brief overview of the mechanisms for swimming motility, and of the basic properties of flows at low Reynolds number, paying special attention to aspects most relevant for swimming such as resistance matrices for solid bodies, flow singularities and kinematic requirements for net translation. Then we review classical theoretical work on cell motility, in particular early calculations of swimming kinematics with prescribed stroke and the application of resistive force theory and slender-body theory to flagellar locomotion. After examining the physical means by which flagella are actuated, we outline areas of active research, including hydrodynamic interactions, biological locomotion in complex fluids, the design of small-scale artificial swimmers and the optimization of locomotion strategies.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18d2248ea7d41b715f105eb214c28ef9a74613e9

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Electrokinetic locomotion due to reaction-induced charge auto-electrophoresis (2010, background): “The fluid mechanics underlying the locomotion of microorganisms has been a rich area of research (see Brennen & Winet 1977; Purcell 1977; Yates 1986; Lauga & Powers 2009).”
Mammalian Sperm Motility: Observation and Theory (2011, background): “…cell swimming, via slender-body theory and resistive-force theory, noting that this field has been reviewed extensively elsewhere (Lighthill 1976, Brennen & Winet 1977, Sleigh 1991, Lauga & Powers 2009). www.annualreviews.org • Mammalian Sperm Motility: Observation and Theory 511 A nn u.”
Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids (2021, neutral): “view articles [21, 42, 43, 19, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48] and books [49, 50, 51].”
Brownian motion of a self-propelled particle. (2010, background): “There are numerous realizations of self-propelled particles [1, 2] in nature ranging from bacteria [3–10] and spermatozoa [11–14] to artificial colloidal microswimmers.”
Spherical squirmers: models for swimming micro-organisms (2016, background): “From Sleigh (1962). and anyway there have been excellent recent reviews of low-Reynolds-number swimming by Lauga & Powers (2009) and by Guasto et al. (2012). at V ienna U niversity L ibrary on O ctober 10, 2016 http://im am at.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Fig.”
Dynamics of filaments and membranes in a viscous fluid (2009, background): “The reader is directed to (Lauga and Powers, 2009) and references therein for a more detailed treatment.”
Fluid dynamics and noise in bacterial cell–cell and cell–surface scattering (2011, background): “The need for experimental tests of the force dipole assumption and, more generally, of the relevance of fluid-mediated interactions for bacteria, is further illustrated by recent measurements on Chlamydomonas reinhardtii [37, 38], the archetypal “puller” microorganism (thrust generation in front of ”
Physics of rheologically enhanced propulsion: Different strokes in generalized Stokes (2013, background): “Although much of the theoretical framework for studying individual microscopic swimmers in water is well-developed [1], many questions about swimming in complex fluids such as mucus remain to be answered.”
Realizing the physics of motile cilia synchronization with driven colloids (2015, background): “ed. Synchronization is a general phenomenon in nature (105), with many technological applications. Hydrodynamic synchronization at low Re is a well dened subset of this, in which coupling is viscous (81), noise (thermal and intrinsic contributions) is important (89, 106), and the details of the driv”
Beneath Our Feet: Strategies for Locomotion in Granular Media (2015, background): “In particular, it is instructive to examine the similarities (and differences) between digging in granular substrates and low–Reynolds number swimming—a topic that has received considerable attention in the fluid dynamics community (e.g., recently reviewed in Lauga & Powers 2009).”
Hydrodynamics of self-propulsion near a boundary: predictions and accuracy of far-field approximations (2012, background): “An important factor for swimming at such scales is the long-range nature of hydrodynamic interactions, either between immersed bodies, or between an immersed body and a surface (Lauga & Powers 2009).”