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Systematic investigation of lipid vesicles propelled by encapsulated magnetic particlesviaan inhomogeneous magnetic field, enabling navigational control and remotely triggered drug release for targeted delivery and precision medicine applications. 

The hydrodynamic interactions between a sedimenting microswimmer and a solid wall have ubiquitous biological and technological applications. A plethora of gravity-induced swimming dynamics near a planar no-slip wall provide a platform for designing artificial microswimmers that can generate directed propulsion through their translation–rotation coupling near a wall. In this work, we provide exact solutions for a squirmer (a model swimmer of spherical shape with a prescribed slip velocity) facing either towards or away from a planar wall perpendicular to gravity. These exact solutions are used to validate a numerical code based on the boundary integral method with an adaptive mesh for distances from the wall down to 0.1 % of the squirmer radius. This boundary integral code is then used to investigate the rich gravity-induced dynamics near a wall, mapping out the detailed bifurcation structures of the swimming dynamics in terms of orientation and distance to the wall. Simulation results show that a squirmer may traverse the wall, move to a fixed point at a given height with a fixed orientation in a monotonic way or in an oscillatory fashion, or oscillate in a limit cycle in the presence of wall repulsion. 

The centrosomal aster is a mobile and adaptable cellular organelle that exerts and transmits forces necessary for tasks such as nuclear migration and spindle positioning. Recent experimental and theoretical studies of nematode and human cells demonstrate that pulling forces on asters by cortically anchored force generators are dominant during such processes. Here, we present a comprehensive investigation of the S-model (S for stoichiometry) of aster dynamics based solely on such forces. The model evolves the astral centrosome position, a probability field of cell-surface motor occupancy by centrosomal microtubules (under an assumption of stoichiometric binding), and free boundaries of unattached, growing microtubules. We show how cell shape affects the stability of centering of the aster, and its transition to oscillations with increasing motor number. Seeking to understand observations in single-cell nematode embryos, we use highly accurate simulations to examine the nonlinear structures of the bifurcations, and demonstrate the importance of binding domain overlap to interpreting genetic perturbation experiments. We find a generally rich dynamical landscape, dependent upon cell shape, such as internal constant-velocity equatorial orbits of asters that can be seen as traveling wave solutions. Finally, we study the interactions of multiple asters which we demonstrate an effective mutual repulsion due to their competition for surface force generators. We find, amazingly, that centrosomes can relax onto the vertices of platonic and nonplatonic solids, very closely mirroring the results of the classical Thomson problem for energy-minimizing configurations of electrons constrained to a sphere and interacting via repulsive Coulomb potentials. Our findings both explain experimental observations, providing insights into the mechanisms governing spindle positioning and cell division dynamics, and show the possibility of new nonlinear phenomena in cell biology. Published by the American Physical Society2025 

Numerically exploring a vesicle passing through two highly confined channels, we analyze the shape, lubrication layer, energy, tank-treading velocity, and excess pressure of a multicomponent vesicle. 

Active colloidal systems with nonequilibrium self-organization constitute a long- standing, challenging area in material sciences and biology. To understand how hydrodynamic flow may be used to actively control self-assembly of Janus particles (JPs), we developed a model for the many-body hydrodynamics of amphiphilic JPs suspended in a viscous fluid with imposed far-field background flows [Fu et al., J. Fluid Mech. 941, A41 (2022)]. In this paper we alter the hydrophobic distribution on the JP-solvent interface to investigate the hydrodynamics that underlies the various morphologies and rheological properties of the JP assembly in the suspension. We find that JPs assemble into unilamellar, multilamellar, and striated structures. To introduce dynamics, we include a planar linear shear flow and a steady Taylor-Green mixing flow and measure the collective dynamics of JP particles in terms of their (a) free energy from the hydrophobic interactions between the JPs, (b) order parameter for the ordering of JPs in terms of alignment of their directors, and (c) strain parameter that captures the deformation in the assembly. We characterize the effective material properties of the JP structures and find that the unilamellar structure increases orientation order under shear flow, the multilamellar structure behaves as a shear thinning fluid, and the striated structure possesses a yield stress. These numerical results provide insights into dynamic control of nonequilibrium active biological systems with similar self-organization.