Search Results
Chemotactic behavior of catalytic motors in microfluidic channels
2013, Baraban, Larysa, Harazim, Stefan M., Sanchez, Samuel, Schmidt, Oliver.G.
Chemotaxis in practice: Two different artificial catalytic micromotors (tubular and spherical, see scheme) show chemotactic behavior in microfluidic channels demonstrating that catalytic micromotors can sense the gradient of chemical fuel in their environment and be directed towards desired locations.
The full Keller-Segel model is well-posed on fairly general domains
2016, Horstmann, Dirk, Rehberg, Joachim, Meinlschmidt, Hannes
In this paper we prove the well-posedness of the full Keller-Segel system, a quasilinear strongly coupled reaction-crossdiffusion system, in the spirit that it always admits a unique local-in-time solution in an adequate function space, provided that the initial values are suitably regular. Apparently, there exists no comparable existence result for the full Keller-Segel system up to now. The proof is carried out for general source terms and is based on recent nontrivial elliptic and parabolic regularity results which hold true even on fairly general spatial domains, combined with an abstract solution theorem for nonlocal quasilinear equations by Amann. Nous considèrons le système de Keller et Segel dans son intégralité, un système quasilinéaire à réaction-diffusion fortement couplé. Le résultat principal montre que ce syst`eme est bien posé, cest-à-dire il admet une solution unique existant localement en temps à valeurs dans un espace fonctionnel approprié, pourvu que les valeurs initiales sont réguliers. Apparemment, il nexiste pas encore des résultats comparables. Pour la demonstration, nous utilisons des résultats récents de régularité elliptique et parabolique applicable à des domaines assez générals, combiné avec un théorème abstrait dAmann concernant les équations quasilinéaires non locales.
Pseudo-chemotaxis of active Brownian particles competing for food
2020, Merlitz, Holger, Vuijk, Hidde D., Wittmann, René, Sharma, Abhinav, Sommer, Jens-Uwe
Active Brownian particles (ABPs) are physical models for motility in simple life forms and easily studied in simulations. An open question is to what extent an increase of activity by a gradient of fuel, or food in living systems, results in an evolutionary advantage of actively moving systems such as ABPs over non-motile systems, which rely on thermal diffusion only. It is an established fact that within confined systems in a stationary state, the activity of ABPs generates density profiles that are enhanced in regions of low activity, which is thus referred to as ‘anti-chemotaxis’. This would suggest that a rather complex sensoric subsystem and information processing is a precondition to recognize and navigate towards a food source. We demonstrate in this work that in non-stationary setups, for instance as a result of short bursts of fuel/food, ABPs do in fact exhibit chemotactic behavior. In direct competition with inactive, but otherwise identical Brownian particles (BPs), the ABPs are shown to fetch a larger amount of food. We discuss this result based on simple physical arguments. From the biological perspective, the ability of primitive entities to move in direct response to the available amount of external energy would, even in absence of any sensoric devices, encompass an evolutionary advantage.
Cahn--Hilliard--Brinkman model for tumor growth with possibly singular potentials
2022, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Signori, Andrea, Sprekels, Jürgen
We analyze a phase field model for tumor growth consisting of a Cahn--Hilliard--Brinkman system, ruling the evolution of the tumor mass, coupled with an advection-reaction-diffusion equation for a chemical species acting as a nutrient. The main novelty of the paper concerns the discussion of the existence of weak solutions to the system covering all the meaningful cases for the nonlinear potentials; in particular, the typical choices given by the regular, the logarithmic, and the double obstacle potentials are admitted in our treatise. Compared to previous results related to similar models, we suggest, instead of the classical no-flux condition, a Dirichlet boundary condition for the chemical potential appearing in the Cahn--Hilliard-type equation. Besides, abstract growth conditions for the source terms that may depend on the solution variables are postulated.
Optimal control of a phase field system modelling tumor growth with chemotaxis and singular potentials
2019, Colli, Pierluigi, Signori, Andrea, Sprekels, Jürgen
A distributed optimal control problem for an extended model of phase field type for tumor growth is addressed. In this model, the chemotaxis effects are also taken into account. The control is realized by two control variables that design the dispensation of some drugs to the patient. The cost functional is of tracking type, whereas the potential setting has been kept quite general in order to allow regular and singular potentials to be considered. In this direction, some relaxation terms have been introduced in the system. We show the well-posedness of the state system, the Fréchet differentiability of the control-to-state operator in a suitable functional analytic framework, and, lastly, we characterize the first-order necessary conditions of optimality in terms of a variational inequality involving the adjoint variables.