Mercredi 15 janvier à 11h00 ; salle des séminaires IRPHE
In this seminar, I will discuss three topics from my Ph.D. and postdoctoral research: membrane clogging by biological organisms (bioclogging), polar tube eversion in the pathogenic microorganism Microsporidia, and root penetration in soil. In all these systems, spanning scales from hundreds of nanometers for Microsporidia to centimeters for root growth, the coupling between a fluid and a deformable medium plays a key role, but is often obscured by biological complexity. Our approach, based on experiments, analytical modeling, and numerical simulations, focuses on removing the active behavior of these systems to better understand the physical processes at play: poroelasticity and stress dissipation through friction in bioclogging, geometric frustration and viscous dissipation in tube eversion, and coupling between friction and growth in the case of root penetration in soils.