Roberto Di Leonardo
IPCF-CNR/Sapienza, Rome, Italy

Swimming in complex environments: from biofilms to bacteria powered micro-devices.

Bacteria can swim by rotating helical flagella hundreds of times in a second. Motility has a fundamental biological role in both cell survival and pathogenicity. On the other hand, from a physics and engineering perspective, motile bacteria represent a cheap and efficient source of work power in miniaturized devices. Exploiting this energy requires a deep understanding of bacterial behaviors, from the hydrodynamic aspects of self-propulsion to the stochastic dynamics of synthetic objects driven by bacteria collisions. I will discuss both of these aspects taking as examples some of our recent work, i.e. swimming in structured environments or the targeted delivery of colloidal cargoes.