Fluid Mechanics of Propulsion by Cilia and Flagella

Since the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics first published a review on microorganism locomotion by Jahn & Votta (1972) considerable progress has been made in the understanding of both the biological and the fluid-mechanical processes involved not only in microorganism locomotion but also in other fluid systems utilizing cilia. Much of this knowledge and research, which has been built on the solid foundation of the pioneering work of Sir James Gray (1928, 1968) and Sir Geoffrey Taylor (1951, 1952a,b), has been reported extensively elsewhere, particularly by Gray (1928, 1968), Sleigh (1962), Lighthill (1975), and Wu, Brokaw & Brennen (1975). The subject is now sufficiently broad that it precludes any exhaustive treatment in these few pages. Rather, we restrict this review primarily to a summary of present understanding of the low-Reynolds-number flows associated with microorganism propulsion and the hydromechanics of ciliary systems. In this introductory section we wish to put such fluid-mechanical studies in biological perspective. Section 2 outlines the present status of low-Reynolds-number slender-body theory, and we discuss the application of this theory to biological systems in the final sections.