| Speaker: | Alexei Medovikov (Center for Computational Science, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana) | |||
| Title: | Numerical Simulation of Spirochete Motility |
| Abstract: |
A spirochete is a bacterium with a characteristic helical, elastic body.
Because of its unique structure, a spirochete can swim in highly viscous,
gel-like media, such as collagen within the mammal, and mucosal surfaces.
Several species of spirochetes cause medically important diseases, some
with grave consequences: Weil's disease, syphilis, yaws, bejel, pinta,
Lyme disease (which is the most prevalent vector-borne disease in the
United States), relapsing fever, leptospirosis and more. The spirochete is
composed of different connected parts that have complicated shapes
(several flagella, elastic spirochete's body, outer sheath and motors).
We consider three aspects of the model: model of the geometry, model of
the mechanical motion and the regularized Stokeslet method for simulation
of fluid dynamics of the spirochete.
We investigate the role of the geometry for the swimming and how we can
compute global measurable characteristics of the motion.
| |