ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Reconfigurable microbots folded from simple colloidal chains.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Orientational bistability and field-controlled switching of a superparamagnetic dimer.Soft matter · 2026Article
- Structural Evolution of Biomedical Microrobots: From Rigid to Soft to Rigid-Soft Integrated Systems.Gels (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Reconfigurable assembly, disassembly, and self-propulsion of microparticles via optoelectronic tweezers.Microsystems & nanoengineering · 2026Article
- Learning to Navigate in Chemical Fields Without A Map at Low Reynolds Numbers.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Giant activity-induced elasticity in entangled polymer solutions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Actuating superparamagnetic nanoparticle monolayers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Transient colloidal crystals fueled by electrochemical reaction products.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Activity-driven polymer knotting for macromolecular topology engineering.Science advances · 2024Article
- Curvature induces and enhances transport of spinning colloids through narrow channels.Soft matter · 2024Article
- Progress in the Synthesis of Colloidal Machines.Accounts of materials research · 2024Article
- Collective chemomechanical oscillations in active hydrogels.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Colloidal tubular microrobots for cargo transport and compression.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Biomimetic thermoresponsive superstructures by colloidal soft-and-hard co-assembly.Science advances · 2023Article
- Polymer folding through active processes recreates features of genome organization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Rolling of soft microbots with tunable traction.Science advances · 2023Article
- Review
- Rolling microswarms along acoustic virtual walls.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Multimodal microwheel swarms for targeting in three-dimensional networks.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Extension of Kelvin's equation to dipolar colloids.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Field-Induced Assembly and Propulsion of Colloids.Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
To overcome the reversible nature of low-Reynolds-number flow, a variety of biomimetic microrobotic propulsion schemes and devices capable of rapid transport have been developed. However, these approaches have been typically optimized for a specific function or environment and do not have the flexibility that many real organisms exhibit to thrive in complex microenvironments. Here, inspired by adaptable microbes and using a combination of experiment and simulation, we demonstrate that one-dimensional colloidal chains can fold into geometrically complex morphologies, including helices, plectonemes, lassos, and coils, and translate via multiple mechanisms that can be varied with applied magnetic field. With chains of multiblock asymmetry, the propulsion mode can be switched from bulk to surface-enabled, mimicking the swimming of microorganisms such as flagella-rotating bacteria and tail-whipping sperm and the surface-enabled motion of arching and stretching inchworms and sidewinding snakes. We also demonstrate that reconfigurability enables navigation through three-dimensional and narrow channels simulating capillary blood vessels. Our results show that flexible microdevices based on simple chains can transform both shape and motility under varying magnetic fields, a capability we expect will be particularly beneficial in complex in vivo microenvironments.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.