BioPACIFIC MIP Research Featured in Soft Matter Editorial Board Highlights of 2022
Highlighting contributions in high-throughput microscopy.
The recent publication by Yimin Luo, Mengyang Gu, Chelsea Edwards, Megan Valentine and Matthew Helgeson entitled, “High-throughput microscopy to determine morphology, microrheology, and phase boundaries applied to phase separating coacervates” has been featured in the online themed collection Soft Matter Editorial Board Highlights of 2022 featuring some of the most popular articles published in the journal Soft Matter during the past year.
The research reported utilized the high-throughput micro-rheology platform at BioPACIFIC MIP to achieve simultaneous, in situ mapping of time-evolving morphology and micro-rheology in phase separating complex fluids over a large compositional space. Morphology and rheology were measured simultaneously and kinetically after mixing to track the progression of phase separation. Characterizing these dependencies typically requires careful measurement of a large number of equilibrium and transport properties that are difficult to measure in situ as phase separation proceeds, but as demonstrated, BioPACIFIC MIP’s new high-throughput platform creates new workflow capabilities, allowing for efficient measurement of material properties during compositional changes by obviating the need to separate the different emerging phases for ex situ characterization.
