Kinematics of the most efficient cilium.

In a variety of biological processes, eukaryotic cells use cilia to transport flow. Although cilia have a remarkably conserved internal molecular structure, experimental observations report very diverse kinematics. To address this diversity, we determine numerically the kinematics and energetics of the most efficient cilium. Specifically, we compute the time-periodic deformation of a wall-bound elastic filament leading to transport of a surrounding fluid at minimum energetic cost, where the cost is taken to be the positive work done by all internal molecular motors. The optimal kinematics are found to strongly depend on the cilium bending rigidity through a single dimensionless number, the Sperm number, and closely resemble the two-stroke ciliary beating pattern observed experimentally.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2012-04-27

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.038101arXiv 1204.6097PMID 22861901
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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