Bacteria and other unicellular organisms developed sophisticated ways to actively navigate their way, despite being comparably simple structures. To reveal these mechanisms, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) used oil droplets as a model for biological microswimmers. Corinna Maass, group leader at the MPI-DS and associate professor at the University of Twente, together with her colleagues, investigated the navigation strategies of microswimmers in several studies: how they navigate against the current in narrow channels, how they mutually affect their movement, and how they collectively start rotating in order to move.
