Swimming with emergent cilia coordination

The coordinated movement of cilia is used by cells to manipulate surrounding fluids, with a notable and well-studied example being propulsion by microorganisms. While emergent cilia collective dynamics and the resulting propulsion are clearly linked, these two phenomena are often addressed separately in models. Simplified rotor models can query coordination, but not necessarily propulsion, and detailed, filament-level models can more accurately characterise propulsion, but typically do so with prescribed cilia motion. In this talk, I will introduce a filament oscillator model that is able to treat both emergence and propulsion simultaneously and use it to examine the swimming of a sphere covered in thousands of cilia. In doing so, we will demonstrate how cilia density, elasticity and length affect the coordinated dynamics and resulting swimming behaviour, and show how dynamics at the individual cilia level is linked to population level motion and function.