"Living fluids: blood flow and microswimmers"

In this talk I will focus on passive and active motion in blood suspension and other suspensions. I will first discuss how to model blood flow from microscopic considerations (i.e. by taking blood element explicitly into account, e.g. red blood cells). I will show some dynamics of individual red blood cells, and then present collective dynamics and some intringuing rheological behaviors in microcirculation. I will then discuss some issues related to the so-called ameboid swimming. Microorganisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, are able to propel themselves forward thanks to flagella or cilia activity. By contrast, other organisms employ pronounced changes of the membrane shape to achieve propulsion, a prototypical example being the Eutreptiella gymnastica. Cells of the immune system as well as dictyostelium amoebas, traditionally believed to crawl on a substratum, can also swim in a similar way. A model will be presented and it will be shown that fast propulsion can be achieved with adequate shape adaptations. The autopropulsion distance over one cycle is a universal linear function of a simple geometrical dimensionless quantity A/V^(2/3) (V and A are the cell volume and its membrane area). This study captures the peculiar motion of Eutreptiella gymnastica with simple force distribution.