Swimming in circles: motion of bacteria near solid boundaries.

By Eric Lauga, Willow R Diluzio, George M. Whitesides, Howard A. Stone. Biophysical Journal, 2005

953 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Near a solid boundary, Escherichia coli swims in clockwise circular motion. We provide a hydrodynamic model for this behavior. We show that circular trajectories are natural consequences of force-free and torque-free swimming and the hydrodynamic interactions with the boundary, which also leads to a hydrodynamic trapping of the cells close to the surface. We compare the results of the model with experimental data and obtain reasonable agreement. In particular, the radius of curvature of the trajectory is observed to increase with the length of the bacterium body.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88d2717b134a561dffbae4b985daa1a38d58788a

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Citations in the corpus

Physics of microswimmers—single particle motion and collective behavior: a review (2014, background): “Since the cell is force and torque free, the body and flagella bundle rotation imply a clockwise rotational motion for a no-slip boundary condition (Lauga et al., 2006; Lemelle et al., 2010; Li et al., 2008; Lopez and Lauga, 2014), see Fig.”
Human sperm accumulation near surfaces: a simulation study (2009, background): “Lauga et al. (2006) modelled Escherichia coli as spherical cells with a single helical tail representing the flagellar bundle and were able to give fundamental explanations for both the forces attracting cells to the boundary and the circular swimming paths that cells follow, by analysing the…”
The Selective Value of Bacterial Shape (2006, background): “Most importantly, experiments and calculations indicate that cell length affects the size of the circle: short cells move in smaller circles than do longer cells (186).”
Modelling bacterial behaviour close to a no-slip plane boundary: the influence of bacterial geometry (2010, methodology): “As described in previous analyses (Lauga et al. 2006), the swimmer must rotate about the normal direction to the boundary in order to balance the torque induced by the body and tail rotating axially near a boundary.”
Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids (2021, background): “In a Newtonian fluid, it has long been observed experimentally that swimming bacteria are attracted by surfaces [191, 192, 193, 186].”
Microbial distribution in soils: physics and scaling (2008, background): “The hydrodynamic consequence of this can be surprising: cells approaching a surface are trapped in the boundary layer and swim in clockwise circles (Lauga et al., 2006), cells in shear flow near a surface align and swimming upstream along left sidewalls or crevices (Hill et al.”
Fluid dynamics of self-propelled microorganisms, from individuals to concentrated populations (2007, background): “coli near surfaces (Lauga et al. 2006), where the specific interactions between helical flagella and a boundary are crucial.”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “(1901) and, since then, has been observed in many different situations, in particular close to a substrate for bacteria (Berg and Turner, 1990; DiLuzio et al., 2005; Hill et al., 2007; Lauga et al., 2006; Schmidt et al., 2008; Shenoy et al., 2007) and spermatozoa (Friedrich and Jülicher, 2008; Riede”
Bacterial hydrodynamics (2015, background): “The switch from forward to circular swimming is a fluid dynamics effect owing to new forces and moments induced near surfaces (Lauga et al., 2006).”