Date: 03/06/09

Speaker: Dr. R. Bouffanais

Title: A simple model to understand mechanotaxis involved in amoeba crawling

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 the present talk, I will 
introduce the fundamentals of swimming at low Reynolds number and then  describe a model
I have developed allowing to better understand how  mechanotaxis works with amoebae.