Dresden 2009 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 10: Biofluiddynamics

BP 10.6: Talk

Tuesday, March 24, 2009, 15:30–15:45, HÜL 186

Steering chiral swimmers along noisy helical paths — •Benjamin M. Friedrich and Frank Julicher — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Str. 38, 01187 Dresden

Helical swimming of microorganisms is ubiquitous in nature and has been observed e.g. for sperm cells, eukaryotic flagellates, and even bacteria. A simple feedback mechanism enables these chiral swimmers to navigate upwards a concentration gradient of a chemoattractant [1]. We characterize the robustness of this chemotaxis strategy in the presence of non-equilibrium fluctuations [2] and derive a formal analogy to the orientation of a dipol in an external field. For an exemplary search problem, we show that search success is maximal for a finite noise level [3]. Different biological swimmers employ various navigational strategies of which chemotaxis along noisy helical paths is just one example. We discuss the availableness of different strategies to a swimmer as a function of the noise level and give biological examples.
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