Morphological Control of Microtubule-Encapsulating Giant Vesicles by Changing Hydrostatic Pressure.

For the development of artificial cell-like machinery, liposomes encapsulating cytoskeletons have drawn much recent attention. However, there has been no report showing isothermally reversible morphological changes of liposomes containing cytoskeletons. We succeeded in reversibly changing the shape of cell-sized giant vesicles by controlling the polymerization/depolymerization state of cytoskeletal microtubules that were encapsulated in the vesicles using pressure changes.

Self-Propelled Motion of Monodisperse Underwater Oil Droplets Formed by a Microfluidic Device.

We evaluated the speed profile of self-propelled underwater oil droplets comprising a hydrophobic aldehyde derivative in terms of their diameter and the surrounding surfactant concentration using a microfluidic device. We found that the speed of the oil droplets is dependent on not only the surfactant concentration but also the droplet size in a certain range of the surfactant concentration. This tendency is interpreted in terms of combination of the oil and surfactant affording spontaneous emulsification in addition to the Marangoni effect.

Reversible Morphological Control of Tubulin-Encapsulating Giant Liposomes by Hydrostatic Pressure.

Liposomes encapsulating cytoskeletons have drawn much recent attention to develop an artificial cell-like chemical-machinery; however, as far as we know, there has been no report showing isothermally reversible morphological changes of liposomes containing cytoskeletons because the sets of various regulatory factors, that is, their interacting proteins, are required to control the state of every reaction system of cytoskeletons. Here we focused on hydrostatic pressure to control the polymerization state of microtubules (MTs) within cell-sized giant liposomes (diameters ∼10 μm). MT is the cytoskeleton formed by the polymerization of tubulin, and cytoskeletal systems consisting of MTs are very dynamic and play many important roles in living cells, such as the morphogenesis of nerve cells and formation of the spindle apparatus during mitosis.

Integrated Microfluidic System for Size-Based Selection and Trapping of Giant Vesicles.

Vesicles composed of phospholipids (liposomes) have attracted interest as artificial cell models and have been widely studied to explore lipid-lipid and lipid-protein interactions. However, the size dispersity of liposomes prepared by conventional methods was a major problem that inhibited their use in high-throughput analyses based on monodisperse liposomes. In this study, we developed an integrative microfluidic device that enables both the size-based selection and trapping of liposomes.

Large-area manipulation of microdroplets by holographic optical tweezers based on a hybrid diffractive system.

We report on large-area manipulation of microdroplets by holographic optical tweezers based on a hybrid diffractive system, in which a static computer-generated hologram and a spatial light modulator (SLM) are used. The hybrid diffractive system is useful to manipulate microdroplets on distant areas with the same manner. Experimental results demonstrated that microdroplets were transported successfully in parallel with approximately equivalent velocities over the entire manipulation area.