Related papers: Simulational study of anomalous tracer diffusion i…
Biopolymer networks having a meshwork topology, e.g., extracellular matrix and mucus gels, are ubiquitous. It is an open question to understand how self-propelled agents such as Janus colloidal particles diffuse through such a biopolymer…
The induced diffusion of tracers in a bacterial suspension is studied theoretically and experimentally at low bacterial concentrations. Considering the swimmer-tracer hydrodynamic interactions at low-Reynolds number and using a kinetic…
Tracking of individual particle and studying their motion serves as a direct means to understand the dynamics in crowded and complex environments. In this study, the dynamics of tracer particles in the matrix of dense soft-colloidal…
Populations of swimming microorganisms produce fluid motions that lead to dramatically enhanced diffusion of tracer particles. Using simulations of suspensions of swimming particles in a periodic domain, we capture this effect and show that…
Diffusive transport of small molecules within the internal structures of biological and synthetic material systems is complex because the crowded environment presents chemical and physical barriers to mobility. We explored this mobility…
The behavior of microgels near surfaces and their adsorption is studied by simple scaling theory. Two different types of microgels can be studied, i.e., fractal type microgels and randomly crosslinked polymer chains. In the first case the…
We present a comprehensive investigation of polymer diffusion in the semidilute regime by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) and dynamic light scattering (DLS). Using single-labeled polystyrene chains, FCS leads to the…
Optical tracking in vivo experiments reveal that diffusion of particles in biological cells is strongly enhanced in the presence of ATP and the experimental data for animal cells could previously be reproduced within a phenomenological…
We analyze diffusion of small particles in a solid polymeric medium taking into account a short range particle-polymer interaction. The system is modeled by a particle diffusion on a ternary lattice where the sites occupied by polymer…
The random motion of molecules in living cells has consistently been reported to deviate from standard Brownian motion, a behavior coined as ``anomalous diffusion''. Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) is a powerful method to…
Microgels are elastic and deformable particles with a hybrid nature between that of polymers and colloids and unconventional behaviours with respect to hard colloids. We investigated the dynamics of a soft microgel made of interpenetrated…
Understanding surface-driven transport is of paramount importance from the perspective of biological applications and the synthesis of microfluidic devices. In this work, we develop an analysis of a local inversion symmetry broken fluid…
The turbulent diffusion of Lagrangian tracer particles has been studied in a flow on the surface of a large tank of water and in computer simulations. The effect of flow compressibility is captured in images of particle fields. The velocity…
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is a glassy polymer widely used in biomedical engineering, namely in microfluidics applications. However, PDMS is known to interact with hydrophobic chemicals. This interaction is exacerbated at the scale of…
A topic of intense current investigation pursues the question how the highly crowded environment of biological cells affects the dynamic properties of passively diffusing particles. Motivated by recent experiments we report results of…
Dynamics of spreading of small droplets on surfaces has been studied by the molecular dynamics method. Simulations have been performed for mixtures of solvent and dimer, and solvent and tetramer droplets. For solvent particles and dimers,…
The hydrodynamic effects of macromolecular crowding inside cells is often studied in vitro by using polymers as crowding reagents. Confinement of polymers inside cell-sized droplets has been shown to affect the diffusion of small molecules.…
We propose a theoretical model which relies on the generalized Langevin equation and may account for various dynamical features of the thermal motion of organelles, vesicles or macromolecules in viscoelastic media such as polymer networks.…
It is widely known that hydrogels, a class of soft materials made of a polymer chain network, are prone to fatigue failure. To understand the underlying mechanism, here we simulate polymer scission and fatigue initiation in the vicinity of…
Experiments on particles' motion in living cells show that it is often subdiffusive. This subdiffusion may be due to trapping, percolation-like structures, or viscoelatic behavior of the medium. While the models based on trapping (leading…