Cellular motility articles from across Nature Portfolio

Through a mechanochemical feedback loop involving Min proteins of Escherichia coli, liposomes start to move, which may help to design motile artificial cells.

Human sperm are shown to cooperate upon transit into high viscosity media with related sperm displaying higher tendencies to cooperate, suggesting sperm attachment is preferential and confers a benefit under inter-ejaculate conditions

The existence of multicellular systems relies on coordinated cell motion in three dimensions. Here, cell migration in rotating spherical tissues is shown to exhibit a collective mode with a single-wavelength velocity wave, which arises from the effect of curvature on the flocking behavior of cells on a spherical surface.

In this work the authors report a quasi two-dimensional population of living cells that can spontaneously self-assemble into finite-sized domains, an analogue of the microphase separation known in inert matter.

Bacteria often reside within complex microenvironments through which they have to navigate efficiently. This paper presents an experimental study of bacterial motility and dispersion within ordered and disordered arrays of obstacles as a proxy to a realistic porous medium and established a bacterial mean free path as the determining factor for bacterial navigation.