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Abstract When a suspension of spherical or near-spherical particles passes through a constriction the particle volume fraction either remains the same or decreases. In contrast to these particulate suspensions, here we observe that an entangled fiber suspension increases its volume fraction up to 14-fold after passing through a constriction. We attribute this response to the entanglements among the fibers that allows the network to move faster than the liquid. By changing the fiber geometry, we find that the entanglements originate from interlocking shapes or high fiber flexibility. A quantitative poroelastic model is used to explain the increase in velocity and extrudate volume fraction. These results provide a new strategy to use fiber volume fraction, flexibility, and shape to tune soft material properties, e.g., suspension concentration and porosity, during delivery, as occurs in healthcare, three-dimensional printing, and material repair. 

Abstract Microtubules are generated at centrosomes, chromosomes, and within spindles during cell division. Whereas microtubule nucleation at the centrosome is well characterized, much remains unknown about where, when, and how microtubules are nucleated at chromosomes. To address these questions, we reconstitute microtubule nucleation from purified chromosomes in meiotic Xenopus egg extract and find that chromosomes alone can form spindles. We visualize microtubule nucleation near chromosomes using total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy to find that this occurs through branching microtubule nucleation. By inhibiting molecular motors, we find that the organization of the resultant polar branched networks is consistent with a theoretical model where the effectors for branching nucleation are released by chromosomes, forming a concentration gradient that spatially biases branching microtbule nucleation. In the presence of motors, these branched networks are ultimately organized into functional spindles, where the number of emergent spindle poles scales with the number of chromosomes and total chromatin area. 

We provide a direct derivation of the typical time derivatives used in a continuum description of complex fluid flows, relying on principles of the kinematics of line elements.

 

Covariance mapping is widely used to study correlations of different variables in the dataset. The power of the method has been demonstrated in multi-particle imaging, including two- and three-body covariance on molecules of biological relevance and Coulomb explosion imaging (CEI) of molecular dissociation dynamics. While covariance for two particles is rather straightforward, for four-body correlations, one needs to extend covariance mapping to cumulant mapping, which has been tested in recent measurements of strong field ionization of formaldehyde. Here, I will discuss the details of how to compute cumulant mapping for the momentum sum of all four fragments of the formaldehyde molecule, and how one can perform the calculation with a faster and better algorithm.