Simulation-driven discovery of morphology-function relationships in microswimmers

Abstract

For more than a billion years, microorganisms have evolved complex strategies for navigating aquatic habitats, despite the fundamental limitations and constraints imposed by their physical environment. A common theme across these strategies is the use of active slender appendages (cilia, flagella, archaella) to generate self-propulsion. Diverse selection pressures and evolutionary trajectories have driven the emergence of drastically different morphologies of biological microswimmers, each tailored for distinct functions ranging from motility to taxis to prey capture to feeding. Despite the biological and ecological significance of these intricate microscale processes, realistic computational modelling of these organisms and their behaviours is still in its infancy. Here, we present a comprehensive open-source simulation platform for motile microswimmers, that faithfully captures the universal hydrodynamic principles shared by such systems. We illustrate the predictive power and versatility of this approach to resolve and explore morphology-function relationships across different microswimmer species and provide new insights into the diversification of locomotion strategies in early eukaryotes.