2008/06/04 by J. T. Locsei, T. J. Pedley, Locsei, Janos Tobias +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Cell Behavior (q-bio.CB) #FOS: Biological sciences #Micro and Nano Robotics #Microfluidic and Bio-sensing Technologies #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0806.0744
openalex publication_date 2008/06/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Previously published experimental work by other authors has shown that certain motile marine bacteria are able to track free swimming algae by executing a zigzag path and steering toward the algae at each turn. Here, we propose that the apparent steering behaviour could be a hydrodynamic effect, whereby an algal cell's vorticity and strain-rate fields rotate a pursuing bacterial cell in the appropriate direction. Using simplified models for the bacterial and algal cells, we numerically compute the trajectory of a bacterial cell and demonstrate the plausibility of this hypothesis.