Microfluidics for Soft Matter and Mechanobiology, Volume I
A special issue of Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X). This special issue belongs to the section "B:Biology and Biomedicine".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (29 February 2020) | Viewed by 62236
Special Issue Editor
Interests: soft matter; viscoelastic microfluidics; droplet microfluidics; mechanobiology; single cell analysis; bio-printing; hydrogel; rheology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Microfluidics has served as a useful platform to understand the material properties and technical applications of soft matter, including hydrogels, polymer solutions, emulsions, and colloidal suspensions. The study of the characteristics of soft matter, like viscoelasticity, non-Newtonian fluid mechanics, and deformation has greatly benefitted from using microfluidics to accurately control conditions in time and space. Under constrained microfluidic conditions, the dynamics of soft matter are monitored by direct visualization or by microrheology to track and quantify the movement of probes.
Microfluidics has also served as a useful platform to study biological cell and tissues systems, including mechanobiology. Using microfluidics, external mechanical stress is regulated in physiologically-relevant systems for studying cells, tissues and organisms to understand how mechanical cues are sensed and transduced into biochemical and electrical signals that influence mechano-transduction in processes such as cell proliferation, migration and fate determination. Furthermore, the characteristics of soft matter are exploited when combined with microfluidic platforms to mimic in-vivo microenviroments like extracellular matrix to directly test the influence of mechanical cues such as softness and elasticity. In addition, microfluidics platforms enable us to measure the mechanical properties of cells by establishing defined flow or confined microstructures through viscoelastic particles/cells focusing and droplet microfluidics. Finally, the 3D bio-printing of soft matter via microdevices has become widely employed.
In this Special Issue, we highlight recent progress in microfluidics with research papers, short communications, and review articles that focus on novel methodological developments and applications of microfluidics devices for soft matter and mechanobiology, as well as emerging intriguing phenomena of soft matter in microfluidics.
Dr. Sung Sik Lee
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- Soft matter
- Viscoelastic microfluidics
- Droplet microfluidics
- Hydrogel
- Rheology
- Microrheology
- Bio-printing
- Mechanobiology
- Deformability
- Mechano-transduction
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