I am very happy to announce that our paper on how bacteria use type IV pili to move over a substrate is published in PRE!

We find that a tug-of-war mechanism alone is able to explain the persistent motion of bacteria without including any directional memory. In our work, we also predict that substrate friction might play a major role during the motility of cell aggregates.

The paper can be found here: Pönisch, W., Weber, C.A. and Zaburdaev, V. Phys. Rev. E 99, 042419 (2019). The arxiv version can be found here: arxiv

This project has been one of my favorites in the last three years and I hope people will enjoy reading it.