Lab on a bead with oscillatory centrifugal microfluidics for fast and complete mixing enables fast and accurate biomedical assays.

Rapid mixing and precise timing are key for accurate biomedical assay measurement, particularly when the result is determined as the rate of a reaction: for example rapid immunoassay in which the amount of captured target is kinetically determined; determination of the concentration of an enzyme or enzyme substrate; or as the final stage in any procedure that involves a capture reagent when an enzyme reaction is used as the indicator. Rapid mixing and precise timing are however difficult to achieve in point-of-care devices designed for small sample volumes and fast time to result. By using centrifugal microfluidics and transposing the reaction surface from a chamber to a single mm-scale bead we demonstrate an elegant and easily manufacturable solution.

The intrinsic piezoelectric properties of materials - a review with a focus on biological materials.

Piezoelectricity, a linear electromechanical coupling, is of great interest due to its extensive applications including energy harvesters, biomedical, sensors, and automobiles. A growing amount of research has been done to investigate the energy harvesting potential of this phenomenon. Traditional piezoelectric inorganics show high piezoelectric outputs but are often brittle, inflexible and may contain toxic compounds such as lead.

A comparative study of tough hydrogen bonding dissipating hydrogels made with different network structures.

Hydrogels are excellent soft materials to interface with biological systems. Precise control and tunability of dissipative properties of gels are particularly interesting in tissue engineering applications. In this work, we produced hydrogels with tunable dissipative properties by photopolymerizing a second polymer within a preformed cross-linked hydrogel network of poly(acrylamide).