3:00pm to 4:00pm |
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Engineered Living Flagellum
(Seminar/Conference)
For the last few decades, engineering has produced marvelous machines and devices. With increasing understanding of living cells, there are possibilities of developing biological machines where engineering precision meets the variability of life. Can order emerge from such variability and chaos? If so, then one can envision machines with unprecedented capabilities, as they would carry the footprints of the evolutionary journey of life. Here, we demonstrate an elementary biological machine. A large family of micro-organisms such as bacteria and spermatozoa wag or twist hair-like flagella to swim. At this small scale, locomotion is challenged by large viscous drag and negligible inertial forces. The organisms must generate time irreversible deformation of their flagella to produce thrust. Mimicking this strategy, we developed a self-propelled, microscale flagellar biohybrid swimmer by combining a unique fabrication and cell culture technique with a slender body hydrodynamics model [1]. Our swimmer consists of a PDMS filament shaped like a spermatozoa with a short, rigid head and long, slender tail on which cardiomyocytes are selectively cultured. The cardiomyocytes contract and bend the filament. The bending wave travels towards the tail end of the filament generating a fluid drag, which acts as a thrust to propel the swimmer forward against its longitudinal drag. The swimmer demonstrates the feasibility of an autonomous synthetic biohybrid swimmer at small scale that can be incorporated into more complex designs. More information...
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