TY - JOUR T1 - MicroMotility: State of the art, recent accomplishments and perspectives on the mathematical modeling of bio-motility at microscopic scales JF - Mathematics in Engineering Y1 - 2020 A1 - Daniele Agostinelli A1 - Roberto Cerbino A1 - Del Alamo, Juan C A1 - Antonio DeSimone A1 - Stephanie Höhn A1 - Cristian Micheletti A1 - Giovanni Noselli A1 - Eran Sharon A1 - Julia Yeomans KW - active matter KW - adhesive locomotion KW - cell motility KW - cell sheet folding KW - knotted DNA KW - topological defects KW - unicellular swimmers KW - unjamming transition AB -

Mathematical modeling and quantitative study of biological motility (in particular, of motility at microscopic scales) is producing new biophysical insight and is offering opportunities for new discoveries at the level of both fundamental science and technology. These range from the explanation of how complex behavior at the level of a single organism emerges from body architecture, to the understanding of collective phenomena in groups of organisms and tissues, and of how these forms of swarm intelligence can be controlled and harnessed in engineering applications, to the elucidation of processes of fundamental biological relevance at the cellular and sub-cellular level. In this paper, some of the most exciting new developments in the fields of locomotion of unicellular organisms, of soft adhesive locomotion across scales, of the study of pore translocation properties of knotted DNA, of the development of synthetic active solid sheets, of the mechanics of the unjamming transition in dense cell collectives, of the mechanics of cell sheet folding in volvocalean algae, and of the self-propulsion of topological defects in active matter are discussed. For each of these topics, we provide a brief state of the art, an example of recent achievements, and some directions for future research.

VL - 2 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.3934/mine.2020011 ER -