Control of synchronization in models of hydrodynamically coupled motile cilia

Realizing the physics of motile cilia synchronization with driven colloids

Cilia and flagella in biological systems often show large scale cooperative behaviors such as the synchronization of their beats in “metachronal waves”. These are beautiful examples of emergent dynamics in biology, and are essential for life, allowing diverse processes from the motility of eukaryotic microorganisms, to nutrient transport and clearance of pathogens from mammalian airways. How th...

SnapShot: Motile Cilia

Adaptive Fractional-order Control for Synchronization of Two Coupled Neurons in the External Electrical Stimulation

This paper addresses synchronizing two coupled chaotic FitzHugh–Nagumo (FHN) neurons with weakly gap junction under external electrical stimulation (EES). To transmit information among coupled neurons, by generalization of the integer-order FHN equations of the coupled system into the fractional-order in frequency domain using Crone approach, the behavior of each coupled neuron relies on its pa...

Emergence of polar order and cooperativity in hydrodynamically coupled model cilia.

As a model of ciliary beat, we use two-state oscillators that have a defined direction of oscillation and have strong synchronization properties. By allowing the direction of oscillation to vary according to the interaction with the fluid, with a timescale longer than the timescale of synchronization, we show in simulations that several oscillators can align in a direction set by the geometrica...

Cilia beating patterns are not hydrodynamically optimal

We examine the hydrodynamic performance of two cilia beating patterns reconstructed from experimental data. In their respective natural systems, the two beating patterns correspond to: (A) pumping-specialized cilia, and (B) swimming-specialized cilia. We compare the performance of these two cilia beating patterns as a function of the metachronal coordination in the context of two model systems:...