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Droplet microfluidics, in which micro-droplets serve as individual reactors, has enabled a wide range of high-throughput biochemical processes. Unlike solid wells typically used in current biochemical assays, droplets are subject to…
Collective behaviors such as swarming, chemical signaling, and clustering are fundamental to biological microorganisms, enabling hierarchical colony formation, coordinated motion, and enhanced nutrient accessibility crucial for their…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
The multiphase flow of droplets is widespread, both at the industrial and the microscale, for both biological and non-biological applications alike. But the ensemble interactions of such systems are inherently nonlinear and complex,…
An active area of research interest is the inference of ecological models of complex microbial communities. Inferring such ecological models entails understanding the interactions between microbes and how they affect each other's growth.…
Controlling fluid droplets efficiently in the microscale is of great interest both from a basic science and a technology perspective. We have designed and developed a general-purpose, highly scalable microfluidic control strategy through a…
Self-propelled particles with hydrodynamic interactions (microswimmers) have previously been shown to produce long-range ordering phenomena. Many theoretical explanations for these collective phenomena are connected to instabilities in the…
Biomolecular condensates are essential for cellular organization and result from phase separation in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Among various models, chemically active droplets play a significant role, consisting of…
We investigate the effect of cooperative interactions in an ensemble of microorganisms, modelled as self-propelled disk-like and rod-like particles, in a three-dimensional turbulent flow to show flocking as an emergent phenomenon. Building…
Andrew J. deMello is professor of Biochemical Engineering in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Z\"urich. In this contribution he describes the efforts that his lab has undertaken in developing novel microfluidic…
Droplet-based microfluidics has emerged as a powerful technology for the miniaturization and automation of biochemical assays. The replacement of surfactants by nanoparticles as interfacial stabilizers has gained increasing interest.…
In this fluid dynamics video we explore the nature and causes of the spontaneous ordering that emerges in a dense bacterial suspension under confinement. Recent experiments with B. Subtilis confined within small flattened drops show that…
Turing theory of pattern formation is among the most popular theoretical means to account for the variety of spatio-temporal structures observed in Nature and, for this reason, finds applications in many different fields. While Turing…
D. Jed Harrison is a full professor at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. Here he describes the development of microfluidic techniques in his lab from the initial demonstration of an integrated separation system for…
The activity of biological cells is primarily based on chemical reactions and typically modeled as a reaction-diffusion system. Cells are, however, highly crowded with macromolecules, including a variety of molecular machines such as…
Dripping, jetting and tip streaming have been studied up to a certain point separately by both fluid mechanics and microfluidics communities, the former focusing on fundamental aspects while the latter on applications. Here, we intend to…
We introduce a phenomenological theory for a new class of soft active fluids, with the ability to synchronise. Our theoretical framework describes the macroscopic behaviour of a collection of interacting anisotropic elements with cyclic…
Directing individual motions of many constituents to coherent dynamical state is a fundamental challenge in multiple fields. Here, based on the spherical crystal model, we show that topological defects in particle arrays can be a crucial…
The effect of crowding on the run-and-tumble dynamics of swimmers such as bacteria is studied using a discrete lattice model of mutually excluding particles that move with constant velocity along a direction that is randomized at a rate…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…