Motility of Colonial Choanoflagellates and the Statistics of Aggregate Random Walkers

We illuminate the nature of the three-dimensional random walks of microorganisms composed of individual organisms adhered together. Such aggregate random walkers are typified by choanoflagellates, eukaryotes that are the closest living relatives of animals. In the colony-forming species Salpingoeca rosetta we show that the beating of each flagellum is stochastic and uncorrelated with others, and the vectorial sum of the flagellar propulsion manifests as stochastic helical swimming. A quantitative theory for these results is presented and species variability discussed.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2015-12-09

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.038102arXiv 1512.02823PMID 26849616PMCID 7616083
• 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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