Hydrodynamic attraction of swimming microorganisms by surfaces.

By Allison Berke, L. Turner, H. Berg, Eric Lauga. Physical Review Letters, 2008

730 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cells swimming in confined environments are attracted by surfaces. We measure the steady-state distribution of smooth-swimming bacteria (Escherichia coli) between two glass plates. In agreement with earlier studies, we find a strong increase of the cell concentration at the boundaries. We demonstrate theoretically that hydrodynamic interactions of the swimming cells with solid surfaces lead to their reorientation in the direction parallel to the surfaces, as well as their attraction by the closest wall. A model is derived for the steady-state distribution of swimming cells, which compares favorably with our measurements. We exploit our data to estimate the flagellar propulsive force in swimming E. coli.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/524b4c656c6eaf180f02c90a8b931f2214a1e630

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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In Ocean Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Fluid dynamics and noise in bacterial cell–cell and cell–surface scattering (2011, background): “[27] Berke AP, Turner L, Berg HC, Lauga E (2008) Hydrodynamic attraction of swimming microorganisms by surfaces.”
Brownian motion of a self-propelled particle. (2010, background): “If the particle is moving close to a substrate and the substrate is not hydrodynamically flat, then hydrodynamic interactions play a significant role, too [65].”
Pressure is not a state function for generic active fluids (2014, background): “) However, even for spherical swimmers, hydrodynamic interactions can now cause torques, both between the particles and near the wall [38], making an equation of state less likely.”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “first one is via far-field reflected flows (Berke et al., 2008; Drescher et al., 2011) as discussed above; the second mechanism involves hydrodynamic torques that arise in anisotropic bodies swimming in close contact with a wall and leading to tilted swimming, i.”
Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids (2021, background): “This phenomenon results from a combination of multiple effects, including far-field hydrodynamic interactions [192], bacteria reorientation due to collisions [194] or Brownian fluctuations [193,195], and surface-induced suppression of flagellar unbundling [196].”
Bacterial hydrodynamics (2015, background): “The dipole strength is on the order of 0.1−1 N µm (Berke et al., 2008; Drescher et al., 2011) and this dipolar picture is very accurate up to a few body lengths away, at which point the flow speeds get overwhelmed by thermal noise.”