Date: 03/26/09

Speaker: Dr. R. Bouffanais

Title: Hydrodynamics of mechanotactic cell motility

Abstract:
Amoebae are protists that live at the micron scale and move by
crawling using pseudopods. When starved, amoebae develop a collective
behavior (emergence) mediated primarily by chemotaxis. Recently,
biologists have shown that mechanotaxis is also involved in this
complex process of self-organization. In this talk, I will introduce
the fundamentals of locomotion at low Reynolds number
and then describe a model developed to better understand amoebae
mechanotactic motility.