Colloidal active matter mimics the behavior of biological microorganisms-an overview

This article provides a review of the recent development of biomimicking behaviors in active colloids. While the behavior of biological microswimmers is undoubtedly influenced by physics, it is frequently guided and manipulated by active sensing processes. Understanding the respective influences of the surrounding environment can help to engineering the desired response also in artificial swimmers. More often than not, the achievement of biomimicking behavior requires the understanding of both biological and artificial microswimmers swimming mechanisms and the parameters inducing mechanosensory responses. The comparison of both classes of microswimmers provides with analogies in their dependence on fuels, interaction with boundaries and stimuli induced motion, or taxis

Back to Basic, Optical Evaluation of Motion in Electric Fields for Specific Surface Charge Determinations

Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) is a widely used tool for the measurement of Zeta Potential, taking benefit of automated detection to achieve fast measurements. However, the mathematical criteria on which the calculations in DLS devices are based, assume a very narrow set of conditions. One of them is a perfect spherical shape, since a hard sphere model is assumed for calculating scattering patterns and therefore the analysis of different shapes could result in significant deviations. One frequent example where the determination of the surface charge in rod shaped colloids is required is the characterization of bacterial surface charges, which is complicated by complex surface properties. To test whether the commercial device gives a reasonable approximation, we constructed a homemade optical device and tested inorganic spherical and rod-shape SiO2 particles and compared them to a model bacterium. A different case is the determination of surface potentials of light sensitive materials under illumination. Commercial devices often do not allow the additional implementation of light sources other than the laser, but our setup flexibly enables us to plug in different illuminations.</p

Effect of Viscosity on Microswimmers: A Comparative Study

Although many biological fluids like blood and mucus exhibit high viscosities, there are still many open questions concerning the swimming behavior of microswimmers in highly viscous media, limiting research to idealized laboratory conditions instead of application-oriented scenarios. Here, we analyze the effect of viscosity on the swimming speed and motion pattern of four kinds of microswimmers of different sizes which move by contrasting propulsion mechanisms: two biological swimmers (bovine sperm cells and Bacillus subtilis bacteria) which move by different bending patterns of their flagella and two artificial swimmers with catalytic propulsion mechanisms (alginate microtubes and Janus Pt@SiO2 spherical microparticles). Experiments consider two different media (glycerol and methylcellulose) with increasing viscosity, but also the impact of surface tension, catalyst activity and diffusion coefficients are discussed and evaluated