Friday, November 3, 2023
10:00 - 11:00
: At the microscopic scale, virtually everything moves. From diverse patterns of movement one can distinguish living from non-living matter, bacteria from eukaryotes, random from directed, purposeful movement. I will discuss our recent work on phenotyping the motility of diverse microeukaryotes from long-time trajectory statistics. These include microswimmers that orchestrate propulsion-generating appendages (cilia and flagella) for swimming through fluids, as well as organisms that glide mysteriously without the need to resort to any appendages at all. We derive species-agnostic measures of active motility from high-speed live imaging experiments. We show how to distinguish between distinct yet stereotyped states (or gaits) of activity, and demonstrate how environmental cues (e.g. physical confinement, light, chemicals) induce systems-level cellular signalling. Finally, we speculate on the implications of these findings for the evolution of cellular decision making in basal eukaryotes.
Soft Matter group
UvA - Faculty of Science
C4.174
Group Seminar, Talk
biophysics, complexity, soft matter
Kirst Wan