Activación externa de micro-reactores inspirados en células artificiales mediante campos de fuerza

Abstract

The challenges in biomimetics today include replicating complex functions of natural cells in synthetic systems. Mimicking these functions, such as sensing/response mechanisms or e cient chemical processing, in arti cial cells has great potential in applications such as contaminant clean-up, clinical diagnosis, drug delivery, tissue synthesis, gene therapy, etc. [1{4] In particular, bioinspired micro-compartments capable of life-like behaviours such as encapsulation of biochemical reactions or selective exchange of compounds with their environment can serve as micro-reactors for biosynthesis or energy conversion [5,6]. Equipping these micro-compartments with mechanisms suitable for exploiting force elds as energy sources would be especially interesting, as force elds o er high levels of spatio-temporal control and versatility, as well as the possibility of acting remotely and reversibly. In particular, electromagnetic force elds constitute an attractive technique for remote manipulation, which would allow ne-grained control of performance, orientation, mixing or content transfer in micro-reactors [7]. Within electromagnetic elds, the use of magnetic elds is particularly noteworthy due to their simplicity, precision, versatility and low cost [8]. Thanks to bottom-up approaches, micro-compartments responsive to these elds can be constructed using magnetic eld-sensitive nanoparticles as building blocks of the micro-compartment architecture. Magnetic eld-sensitive micro-compartments have shown complex behaviors, such as motility and phagocytosis [9, 10]. The starting hypothesis of this PhD thesis is the possibility of remotely, precisely and dynamically manipulating bioinspired micro-compartments through the use of external force elds. In the particular case of arti cial cell-inspired micro-reactors, we hypothesise that external force elds could be harnessed to control their orientation, spatial arrangement, mixing and transfer of contents, reaction rate, etc. Furthermore, the use of external force elds would allow the manipulation of multiple compartments at the same time, making it possible to study collective and dynamic behaviour in micro-reactor populations. Despite these encouraging expectations, research on micro-compartments controllable by force elds is scarce. Thus, the exploration of new approaches and their optimisation is still necessary to establish useful, e cient and fruitful methodologies.