Response of monoflagellate pullers to a shearing flow: A simulation study of microswimmer guidance.

ABSTRACT: Microscale swimming may be intuited to be dominated by background flows, sweeping away any untethered bodies with the prevalent flow direction. However, it has been observed that many microswimmers utilize ambient flows as guidance cues, in some cases resulting in net motion upstream, contrary to the dominant background fluid direction and our accompanying intuition. Thus the hydrodynamic response of small-scale motile organisms requires careful analysis of the complex interaction between swimmer and environment. Here we investigate the effects of a Newtonian shear flow on monoflagellated swimmers with specified body symmetry, representing, for instance, the Leishmania mexicana promastigote, a parasitic hydrodynamic puller that inhabits the microenvironment of a sandfly vector midgu

SUBMITTER: Walker BJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6333290 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature