Cells, even in their simplest forms, exhibit adaptive motion and task execution, capabilities underpinned by their complex and hierarchized architecture, and their ability to dissipate energy. Replicating such intricate behavior at the microscale offers a pathway to uncover the fundamental physical and material ingredients required for biological complexity, while also inspiring the design of...
Magnetic nanobeads, whose dimensions match those of biological agents, show great promise as wirelessly controlled microrobots in fluid environments. Particle tracking experiments reveal that their motion departs from classical diffusion, influenced by interrelated confinement, dipolar interactions, and temperature, affecting magnetic actuation. Our results underscore the challenges of...
Living matter gets its function from soft interactions, multivalency, and constant exchange with the environment, operating far from equilibrium. By applying these principles to synthetic systems, we can create biomaterials that self-assemble, adapt, and respond in biologically inspired ways. This approach supports the development of polymersomes and similar nanoscale structures, whose...
Three-dimensional Covalent Organic Frameworks (3D COFs) possess highly tunable porous structures that hold immense potential for advanced device applications. However, their integration into active nano- and microsystems is currently bottlenecked by conventional solvothermal synthesis methods. These traditional approaches require prolonged reaction times (>12 h) and typically yield...
In equilibrium statistical physics, the fluctuation-compressibility theorem states that the variance of the number of particles, in a region of space with size $R$ , scales as $σ_N∼R^d$, with d the spatial dimension. Active systems, however, often exhibit giant number fluctuations (GNF), where $σ_N∼R^d$, with $β>d$. In contrast, when $β
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous coordination polymers characterized by high surface areas and broad application potential, particularly in biomedicine. However, their conventional synthesis often relies on dangerous organic solvents such as N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), N,N-dimethylacetamide (DMA), and N,N-diethylformamide (DEF)[1, 2]. Among these materials, MIL-53 (Fe) was selected...
In equilibrium statistical physics, the fluctuation-compressibility theorem states that the variance of the number of particles, in a region of space with size $R$ , scales as $σ_N∼R^d$, with d the spatial dimension. Active systems, however, often exhibit giant number fluctuations (GNF), where $σ_N∼R^d$, with $β>d$. In contrast, when $β
Diatom frustules are porous bio-derived silica microstructures with potential as active micro/nanosystems. However, their insulating nature prevents direct electrodeposition, limiting their functionalization with magnetic materials. Here, we introduce a conductive platform to enable iron electrodeposition onto frustules while preserving their native porosity. Polycarbonate membranes were first...
Three-dimensional Covalent Organic Frameworks (3D COFs) possess highly tunable porous structures that hold immense potential for advanced device applications. However, their integration into active nano- and microsystems is currently bottlenecked by conventional solvothermal synthesis methods. These traditional approaches require prolonged reaction times (>12 h) and typically yield...
Nanoconfined water plays a crucial role in nanofluidics, biology, and cutting-edge technologies. The process of melting water monolayers and quasi-two-dimensional confined water involves, as an intermediate stage, the hexatic phase—a state that lies between solid and liquid and is characterized by quasi-long-range orientational order and short-range translational order. However, the influence...
Stimuli-responsive supramolecular materials are smart materials whose molecular organization, and consequently their properties can be controlled using external triggers such as temperature, pH, and light. In recent years, significant efforts have been devoted into developing active liposomes with precisely controllable structural properties. These systems can be leveraged for the programmable...
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous coordination polymers characterized by high surface areas and broad application potential, particularly in biomedicine. However, their conventional synthesis often relies on dangerous organic solvents such as N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), N,N-dimethylacetamide (DMA), and N,N-diethylformamide (DEF)[1, 2]. Among these materials, MIL-53 (Fe) was selected...
Magnetic nanoflowers (MNFs), characterized by high intrinsic magnetic losses and elevated specific absorption rates under clinically relevant alternating magnetic fields, represent promising candidates for magnetic hyperthermia applications [1]. In this work, we present a versatile and scalable platform for the fabrication of dynamic, field-responsive microstructures based on MNFs via a...
Flow networks are fundamental for understanding systems such as animal and plant vasculature or power distribution grids. These networks can encode, transmit, and transform information embodied in the spatial and temporal distribution of their flows. We have explored flow networks that incorporate valves or elements exhibiting nonlinear relationships between flow rate and pressure drop. These...
Transport in active media has been extensively studied in bacterial suspensions, where tracers exhibit short-time superdiffusion followed by long-time diffusion, typically without a clearly resolved ballistic regime or an intrinsic length scale for optimal transport. In microtubule-based active nematics, research has mainly focused on controlling flows through confinement and boundary...
Understanding and controlling how nanomaterials interact with living cells is key to advancing nanomedicine. Our work focuses on the design of chemically programmed, self-assembling supramolecular systems—ranging from hydrogels and nanoparticles to silicon-based microdevices—that can interface with cells to probe, track, and influence their behaviour. These versatile platforms open...
Quasicrystals are one of the most intriguing phases in classical matter. Defying the normal constraint of periodicity that applies to normal crystal structures, they can exhibit rotational symmetries that are forbidden for periodic crystals, e.g. 10-, 12-, 18-, 20-fold symmetries. These symmetries can be easily recognized in their diffraction patterns -- and it is this characteristic that led...
Among living organisms, plants offer a rich repertoire of biological strategies for interacting with complex and heterogeneous environments, shaped by millions of years of evolution across both terrestrial and aquatic habitats.
In this talk, we explore how key functional principles from plant biology can be translated into plant-inspired and biohybrid microfabricated systems, and how the...
Many bacteria inhabit hydrated environments like soil, textiles and agar hydrogels in the lab. In these environments, cells are surrounded by a water meniscus. First, I will show that the resulting capillary forces organize bacterial colonies, enabling cells to aggregate into densely packed nematic layers while still allowing them to slide past one another. Second, I will show that, when these...
Cells can move directionally along gradients of substrate stiffness- a process called durotaxis. In most studied situations, durotaxis relies on cell-substrate focal adhesions to sense stiffness and transmit forces that drive directed motion. Until recently, it was not known whether and how durotaxis could take place in the absence of focal adhesions. However, our experimental collaborators...
Active matter refers to systems that consume energy from their surroundings, converting it into forces and motion, keeping them out of equilibrium and leading to diverse phenomena, from moving crowds to bacterial biofilms. This behaviour drives collective and stochastic dynamics, often linked to biological processes.
This study presents an active system with three components: an ATP...
Ion-exchange polymers offer a versatile platform for self-phoretic active colloids. Nafion, rich in sulfonic groups, generates strong ionic gradients and electric fields during counterion exchange when immersed in water, enabling autonomous fluid pumping and propulsion. Building on our earlier work with immobilized Nafion pumps, we now extend these concepts to fully motile colloidal swimmers....
Active matter refers to systems that consume energy from their surroundings, converting it into forces and motion, keeping them out of equilibrium and leading to diverse phenomena, from moving crowds to bacterial biofilms. This behaviour drives collective and stochastic dynamics, often linked to biological processes.
This study presents an active system with three components: an ATP...
Cells can move directionally along gradients of substrate stiffness- a process called durotaxis. In most studied situations, durotaxis relies on cell-substrate focal adhesions to sense stiffness and transmit forces that drive directed motion. Until recently, it was not known whether and how durotaxis could take place in the absence of focal adhesions. However, our experimental collaborators...
Micrometric devices have attracted increasing attention for biomedical applications.[1] However, despite their biocompatibility and tunable surface chemistry, they often exhibit limited cellular uptake [2,3]. Self-assembled monolayers represent a reliable approach for modifying the surface chemistry of nano- and micromaterials. In this work, silicon oxide microchips (SiOµC) were functionalized...
Various synthetic stimuli-responsive microscopic systems with impressive control in relative molecular motion have been created [1] to imitate naturally occurring movement of biomolecules. Our group developed a purely supramolecular system where a molecular ‘traveller’ (TCPP) moved along gemini bis-imidazolium gelator fibers over several microns when irradiated with visible light in the...
There is a growing tendency to confine motile microorganisms, such as bacteria, within narrow channels for the purpose of studying their chemotaxis, signaling, and interactions, or to model their motility in porous media. When the width of the channels is comparable to the size of the microorganisms, the free trajectories of two microswimmers can be significantly disrupted when they meet. A...
Radio-frequency (RF) and microwaves (MWs) are widely used owing to their benefits, including rapid transmission speed and broad frequency band. As a result,numerous applications in many different fields, including defense, telecommunications, healthcare, and consumer electronics have emerged.
This work focuses on the synthesis of magnetic functional materials embedded in a polymeric matrix...
Recent advances in polymer chemistry and micro-fabrication have enabled the creation of adaptive materials capable of responding to external stimuli across multiple length scales. By integrating stimuli-responsive units at the molecular level with precise three-dimensional design, it is now possible to engineer synthetic systems that exhibit controlled motion, shape change and sensing. 1-3...
Hydrogels are ideal materials for mimicking the properties of natural tissues such as lymph nodes. Hydrogel interactions with cells and biomolecules can be well understood using appropriate simulation techniques, allowing a rational design of these materials for specific biomedical applications involving ex-vivo procedures. For example, we have recently proposed hydrogels for cancer...
Recently, there has been growing interest in developing biomimetic strategies that provide enhanced spatiotemporal control over molecular self-assembly, enabling access to structures and properties that are unattainable under thermodynamic control. One approach involves mimicking the dissipative self-assembly of cytoskeletal microtubules, which continuously consume chemical fuels to regulate...
A frequent experimental realization of a microswimmer relies on self-chemophoresis. Chemophoresis (also called diffusiophoresis) denotes the motion of a particle immersed in a fluid solution due to a composition gradient. And self-chemophoresis pertains to the case that the gradient is generated by the particle itself through catalytic activity on its surface.
Conceptually one can write...
The study of the formation of condensed, self-ordered phases has remained a central focus in the fields of condensed matter physics and particle physics over the past few decades. Examples of systems capable of forming ordered phases under confinement include electrons on the surface of liquid helium, electrons in quantum dots, and charged particles suspended in plasma1,2. A common...
We experimentally, numerically and analytically explore the diffusive transport of active colloidal particles with sensory delay, navigating motility landscapes in which the self--propulsion speed depends on space. We show how the transport properties can be obtained by replacing the space dependence of the self--propulsion speed by a dynamical stochastic switching process in the absence of...
Morphological control of crystals is utterly important in reticular chemistry, especially as a fundamental strategy toward preparing functional materials of superior properties. Despite the notable advancements in the realm of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), where endeavors primarily focus on shape manipulation at the nano- and microscale during bulk synthesis and subsequent processing at the...
Morphological control of crystals is utterly important in reticular chemistry, especially as a fundamental strategy toward preparing functional materials of superior properties. Despite the notable advancements in the realm of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), where endeavors primarily focus on shape manipulation at the nano- and microscale during bulk synthesis and subsequent processing at the...
Microorganisms and microscale entities swimming in fluids at low Reynolds number (Re) need to devise innovative ways of propulsion to avoid reciprocal motion [1]. A way to break the time-reversible nature of fluid flow at low Re is to use the proximity of a boundary surface. In this work, we design an innovative S-shape micro propeller that rises and levitates from a close plane due to...
Hydrogels are hydrophilic polymeric networks characterized by high water content, permeability, and tunable properties, which make them attractive materials for biomedical applications such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, wound healing, biosensors, bioinks, and catalysis.
Within this framework, peptide‑based hydrogels are particularly appealing due to their mild fabrication...
Light-activated Janus microswimmers offer a programmable active-matter platform in which illumination modulates propulsion and enables controlled density modulations and localization [1,2]. We develop a continuum theory model that captures swimming pressure and the resulting dynamic pattern formation in spatially structured activity landscapes. Our framework couples a conservation law for the...
The study of the formation of condensed, self-ordered phases has remained a central focus in the fields of condensed matter physics and particle physics over the past few decades. Examples of systems capable of forming ordered phases under confinement include electrons on the surface of liquid helium, electrons in quantum dots, and charged particles suspended in plasma1,2. A common...
We experimentally, numerically and analytically explore the diffusive transport of active colloidal particles with sensory delay, navigating motility landscapes in which the self--propulsion speed depends on space. We show how the transport properties can be obtained by replacing the space dependence of the self--propulsion speed by a dynamical stochastic switching process in the absence of...
Many soft and biological systems operate in ionic environments where salts significantly influence water transport and stability. In aqueous electrolyte solutions, viscosity and diffusivity are often described by the empirical Jones–Dole relation and commonly discussed in terms of structure-making (kosmotropic) or structure-breaking (chaotropic) ions [1]. However, the physical basis and the...
In recent years, many efforts have been devoted to characterising liquid mixtures composed of molecules that interact and undergo chemical reactions, such as the cell cytoplasm or pools of short polymers that mimic the primordial soup. In such mixtures, condensates that form via phase separation play a key role. Here, I review the theory of phase separation in the presence of chemical...
Brownian colloids can acquire effective activity when immersed in a dense, out-of-equilibrium medium. In these environments, the surrounding particles continuously transfer energy to the colloids, generating persistent, non-equilibrium fluctuations that can drive ballistic motion at short times and enhanced diffusion at long times. In this talk I will present two distinct scenarios in which...
Many biological systems operating in athermal (active) environments, can be modelled as an information engine, with the key aspect of utilizing information on the fluctuation to extort work from the noisy environment[1]. In this study, we propose a feedback-driven information engine operating in a Gaussian-correlated active reservoir with characteristic strength (Da) and correlation time (ta),...
