Mathematical Biology Seminar

Amy Buchmann
Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, University of Notre Dame

Understanding Bacterial Movement Through the Use of Computational Models

Wednesday, February 11, 2015, at 3:05pm
LCB 219


Computational models play an important role in understanding bacterial movement. The very social Myxococcus xanthus, a bacterium commonly found in soil and known for its multicellular interactions, can be modeled using the subcellular element method. This method allows us to model individual cells and analyze the interactions between cells in order to gain insight into their social behavior. Bacterial flagella may also play an important role in the development of microfluidics devices. Recent experimental work has suggested that the flagella of bacteria may be used as motors in microfluidics devices by creating a bacterial carpet. I will introduce the method of regularized stokeslets and show how this can be implemented to model fluid flow above bacterial carpets and the transport of microscale loads.