Regensburg 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 28: Microswimmers and Microfluidics (joint session DY/BP/CPP)
BP 28.5: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 20. März 2025, 16:15–16:30, H37
Helical motion of microorganisms can be more persistent than straight motion — •Leon Lettermann1, Falko Ziebert1, Mirko Singer2, Freddy Frischknecht2, and Ulrich S. Schwarz1 — 1BioQuant & Institute for Theoretical Physics, Heidelberg University — 2Center for Integrative Infectious Disease Research, Heidelberg University
The movement of microorganisms has been extensively modeled by stochastic active particle models. In three dimensions, both swimming microorganisms, like sperm cells and some bacteria, and gliding microorganisms, like malaria sporozoites in the skin, often exhibit helical trajectories. If the internal driving force is the primary source of noise in the system, it induces random, yet time-correlated variations in the torque. To investigate this effect, we introduce a three-dimensional active rotational Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particle model. We find that the presence of a rotational component and the resulting helical path can mitigate the effect of intrinsic noise in the drive, allowing for larger long-time mean square displacements than straight movement at the same speed. The model not only provides qualitative insights into the constraints faced by microbes that may have led to the evolutionary selection of certain motility patterns, but also presents an analytical, quantitative tool for extracting information from these movements. We present and analyze corresponding data for malaria parasites gliding through hydrogels.
Keywords: Microswimmers; Gliding; Analytical Solution; Experimental Data; Malaria Parasites