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Optimal Cargo Size for Active Diffusion of Biohybrid Microcarriers

Valentino Lepro1,2,†, Robert Großmann1,†, Setareh Sharifi Panah1, Oliver Nagel1, Stefan Klumpp2,3, Reinhard Lipowsky2, and Carsten Beta1,*

  • 1Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht Straße 24/25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
  • 2Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Am Mühlenberg 1, Potsdam 14476, Germany
  • 3Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Systems, Georg August University of Göttingen, Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

  • *beta@uni-potsdam.de
  • †These two authors contributed equally.
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Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 034014 – Published 7 September, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.18.034014

Abstract

As society paves its way towards device miniaturization and precision medicine, microscale actuation and transport become increasingly prominent research fields with high impact in both technological and clinical contexts. In order to accomplish movement of micron-sized objects towards specific target sites, active biohybrid transport systems, such as motile living cells that act as smart biochemically powered microcarriers, have been suggested as an alternative to synthetic microrobots. Inspired by the motility of leukocytes, we propose the amoeboid crawling of eukaryotic cells as a promising mechanism for transport of micron-sized cargoes and present an in-depth study of this type of composite active matter. Its transport properties result from the interactions of an active element (cell) and a passive one (cargo) and reveal an optimal cargo size that enhances the locomotion of the load-carrying cells, even exceeding their motility in the absence of cargo. The experimental findings are rationalized in terms of a biohybrid active particle model that describes the emergent cell-cargo dynamics and enables us to derive the long-time diffusive transport of amoeboid microcarriers. As amoeboid locomotion is commonly observed for mammalian cells such as leukocytes, our results lay the foundations for the study of transport performance of other medically relevant cell types and for extending our findings to more advanced transport tasks in complex environments, such as tissues.

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Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 034014– Published 7 September, 2022
  • Received 5 August 2021
  • Revised 11 April 2022
  • Accepted 1 July 2022
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