ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Emergence of metachronal waves in cilia arrays.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 103 papers.
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Who cites it
103 citing papers in PubMed, 394 citations in OpenAlex.
- Quantitative analysis of mucociliary activity by computational high-speed video reflection microscopy.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2026Article
- Human lungs fluid mechanics: an overview of current modelling techniques.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2026Review
- The European Biophysics Journal Prizes 2025: Recognising biophysical science at sub-cellular, cellular and tissue levels of organisation.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2026Review
- A protein complex in the extreme distal tip of vertebrate motile cilia controls their organization, length, and function.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Modeling tissue-scale ciliary transport and mixing in three-dimensional Newtonian flow.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Light-mediated communication in responsive materials ranging from individual self-oscillators to feedback-driven network.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Dynamics and emergence of metachronal waves in the ciliary band of a metazoan larva.Science advances · 2025Article
- Form and function in biological filaments: a physicist's review.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Review
- Cilia dynamics create a dynamic barrier to penetration of the periciliary layer in human airway epithelia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A protein complex in the extreme distal tip of vertebrate motile cilia controls their organization, length, and function.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Basal Xenobot transcriptomics reveals changes and novel control modality in cells freed from organismal influence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Structure and function relationships of mucociliary clearance in human and rat airways.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Structure and Function Relationships of Mucociliary Clearance in Human and Rat Airways.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Multiorifice acoustic microrobot for boundary-free multimodal 3D swimming.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Active fluctuations of axoneme oscillations scale with number of dynein motors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Flow Physics Guides Morphology of Ciliated Organs.Nature physics · 2024Article
- Metachrony drives effective mucociliary transport via a calcium-dependent mechanism.American journal of physiology. Lung cellular and molecular physiology · 2024Article
- Near-field hydrodynamic interactions determine travelling wave directions of collectively beating cilia.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Curved Surfaces Induce Metachronal Motion of Microscopic Magnetic Cilia.ACS applied materials & interfaces · 2024Article
- STRUCTURE-FUNCTION RELATIONSHIPS OF MUCOCILIARY CLEARANCE IN HUMAN AIRWAYS.Research square · 2024Article
43 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Propulsion by cilia is a fascinating and universal mechanism in biological organisms to generate fluid motion on the cellular level. Cilia are hair-like organelles, which are found in many different tissues and many uni- and multicellular organisms. Assembled in large fields, cilia beat neither randomly nor completely synchronously--instead they display a striking self-organization in the form of metachronal waves (MCWs). It was speculated early on that hydrodynamic interactions provide the physical mechanism for the synchronization of cilia motion. Theory and simulations of physical model systems, ranging from arrays of highly simplified actuated particles to a few cilia or cilia chains, support this hypothesis. The main questions are how the individual cilia interact with the flow field generated by their neighbors and synchronize their beats for the metachronal wave to emerge and how the properties of the metachronal wave are determined by the geometrical arrangement of the cilia, like cilia spacing and beat direction. Here, we address these issues by large-scale computer simulations of a mesoscopic model of 2D cilia arrays in a 3D fluid medium. We show that hydrodynamic interactions are indeed sufficient to explain the self-organization of MCWs and study beat patterns, stability, energy expenditure, and transport properties. We find that the MCW can increase propulsion velocity more than 3-fold and efficiency almost 10-fold--compared with cilia all beating in phase. This can be a vital advantage for ciliated organisms and may be interesting to guide biological experiments as well as the design of efficient microfluidic devices and artificial microswimmers.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.