TY - JOUR
T1 - A geometric criterion for the optimal spreading of active polymers in porous media
AU - Kurzthaler, Christina
AU - Mandal, Suvendu
AU - Bhattacharjee, Tapomoy
AU - Löwen, Hartmut
AU - Datta, Sujit S.
AU - Stone, Howard A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Work by C.K. was funded by the Austrian Science fund (FWF) via the Erwin Schrödinger fellowship (Grant No. J4321-N27). The work was further supported by the NSF grant MCB-1853602 (H.A.S.). Work by S.M. and H.L. was supported by the Deutsche For-schungsgemeinschaft (Grant No. LO 418/23). Work by T.B. and S.S.D. was supported by NSF grant CBET-1941716, the Project X Innovation Fund, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund, a distinguished postdoctoral fellowship from the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University to T.B., and in part by funding from the Princeton Center for Complex Materials, a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center supported by NSF grants DMR-1420541 and DMR-2011750. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - Efficient navigation through disordered, porous environments poses a major challenge for swimming microorganisms and future synthetic cargo-carriers. We perform Brownian dynamics simulations of active stiff polymers undergoing run-reverse dynamics, and so mimic bacterial swimming, in porous media. In accord with experiments of Escherichia coli, the polymer dynamics are characterized by trapping phases interrupted by directed hopping motion through the pores. Our findings show that the spreading of active agents in porous media can be optimized by tuning their run lengths, which we rationalize using a coarse-grained model. More significantly, we discover a geometric criterion for the optimal spreading, which emerges when their run lengths are comparable to the longest straight path available in the porous medium. Our criterion unifies results for porous media with disparate pore sizes and shapes and for run-and-tumble polymers. It thus provides a fundamental principle for optimal transport of active agents in densely-packed biological and environmental settings.
AB - Efficient navigation through disordered, porous environments poses a major challenge for swimming microorganisms and future synthetic cargo-carriers. We perform Brownian dynamics simulations of active stiff polymers undergoing run-reverse dynamics, and so mimic bacterial swimming, in porous media. In accord with experiments of Escherichia coli, the polymer dynamics are characterized by trapping phases interrupted by directed hopping motion through the pores. Our findings show that the spreading of active agents in porous media can be optimized by tuning their run lengths, which we rationalize using a coarse-grained model. More significantly, we discover a geometric criterion for the optimal spreading, which emerges when their run lengths are comparable to the longest straight path available in the porous medium. Our criterion unifies results for porous media with disparate pore sizes and shapes and for run-and-tumble polymers. It thus provides a fundamental principle for optimal transport of active agents in densely-packed biological and environmental settings.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-021-26942-0
DO - 10.1038/s41467-021-26942-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 34873164
AN - SCOPUS:85120922714
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 12
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 7088
ER -