ArticleNature communications2022
Droplets in underlying chemical communication recreate cell interaction behaviors.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Photo-Activated Merging Cascades in Droplet Swarms Upon Synergistic Solvation of Surfactants.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
- The Power of Tiny Spaces.JACS Au · 2026Review
- Programmable Inter-Droplet Communication by Polymer-Gated Ion Transport Through Nanopore Lattices.Small science · 2026Article
- Microbubble elevator induced buoyancy oscillations of reacting droplets.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Directing Salt-Drop Movement on Mesoporous Silica Films.Small science · 2026Article
- Mesoporous Thin Film Architectures: Addressing Material Demands through Molecular Self-Assembly.Accounts of materials research · 2026Article
- Designing of anisotropic gradient surfaces for directional liquid transport: Fundamentals, construction, and applications.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2023Review
- Self-organization of primitive metabolic cycles due to non-reciprocal interactions.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Ordered Mesoporous Electrodes for Sensing Applications.ACS omega · 2023Review
- Threshold magnetic field as a universal criterion for the selective transport of magnetized particles in microdroplets.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Toward droplets displaying life-like interaction behaviors.Biomicrofluidics · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The sensory-motor interaction is a hallmark of living systems. However, developing inanimate systems with "recognize and attack" abilities remains challenging. On the other hand, controlling the inter-droplet dynamics on surfaces is key in microengineering and biomedical applications. We show here that a pair of droplets can become intelligently interactive (chemospecific stimulus-response inter-droplet autonomous operation) when placed on a nanoporous thin film surface. We find an attacker-victim-like non-reciprocal interaction between spatially separated droplets leading to an only-in-one shape instability that triggers a drop projection to selectively couple, resembling cellular phenomenologies such as pseudopod emission and phagocytic-like functions. The nanopore-driven underlying communication and associated chemical activity are the main physical ingredients behind the observed behavior. Our results reveal that basic features found in many living cell types can emerge from a simple two-droplet framework. This work is a promising step towards the design of microfluidic smart robotics and for origin-of-life protocell models.
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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.