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Egelhaaf, Stefan U. (author), Mao, Xiaoming (author), Dijkstra, Marjolijn (author), Pine, David J (author), Kumar, Sanat K. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Koenderink, G.H. (author)Soft materials are usually defined as materials made of mesoscopic entities, often self-organised, sensitive to thermal fluctuations and to weak perturbations. Archetypal examples are colloids, polymers, amphiphiles, liquid crystals, foams. The importance of soft materials in everyday commodity products, as well as in technological applications,...journal article 2024
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Wei, D. (author), Quaranta, G. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Tam, D.S.W. (author)Eukaryotes swim with coordinated flagellar (ciliary) beating and steer by fine-tuning the coordination. The model organism for studying flagellate motility, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, employs synchronous, breaststroke-like flagellar beating to swim, and it modulates the beating amplitudes differentially to steer. This strategy hinges on both...journal article 2024
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Oh, J.J. (author), Ammu, S.K. (author), Vriend-Harwig, V.D. (author), Kieffer, R.Y. (author), Dr. Kleiner, F.K. (author), Balasubramanian, S. (author), Karana, E. (author), Masania, K. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)Engineered living materials (ELMs) are a novel class of functional materials that typically feature spatial confinement of living components within an inert polymer matrix to recreate biological functions. Understanding the growth and spatial configuration of cellular populations within a matrix is crucial to predicting and improving their...journal article 2023
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Balasubramanian, S. (author), Yu, K. (author), Vasquez Cardenas, D. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Meyer, Anne S. (author)Biofilms are three-dimensional (3D) bacterial communities that exhibit a highly self-organized nature in terms of their composition and complex architecture. Bacteria in biofilms display emergent biological properties, such as resistance to antimicrobials and disinfectants that the individual planktonic cells lack. Bacterial biofilms possess...journal article 2021
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Amador, G.J. (author), van Dijk, Dennis (author), Kieffer, R.Y. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Tam, D.S.W. (author)Vital biological processes, such as trafficking, sensing, and motility, are facilitated by cellular lipid membranes, which interact mechanically with surrounding fluids. Such lipid membranes are only a few nanometers thick and composed of a liquid crystalline structure known as the lipid bilayer. Here, we introduce an active, noncontact, two...journal article 2021
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Prabudiansyah, I. (author), van der Valk, R.A. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)FtsH is a membrane-bound protease that plays a crucial role in proteolytic regulation of many cellular functions. It is universally conserved in bacteria and responsible for the degradation of misfolded or misassembled proteins. A recent study has determined the structure of bacterial FtsH in detergent micelles. To properly study the function...journal article 2021
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Yu, K. (author), Spiesz, E.M. (author), Balasubramanian, S. (author), Schmieden, D.T. (author), Meyer, Anne S. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)Sustainable structural materials with excellent impact-resistance properties are urgently needed but challenging to produce, especially in a scalable fashion and with control over 3D shape. Here, we show that bacterial cellulose (BC) and bacterially precipitated calcium carbonate self-assemble into a layered structure reminiscent of tough...journal article 2021
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Balasubramanian, S. (author), Yu, K. (author), Meyer, Anne S. (author), Karana, E. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)Living materials, which are fabricated by encapsulating living biological cells within a non-living matrix, have gained increasing attention in recent years. Their fabrication in spatially defined patterns that are mechanically robust is essential for their optimal functional performance but is difficult to achieve. Here, a bioprinting...journal article 2021
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Wei, D. (author), Ghoddoosi Dehnavi, P. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Tam, D.S.W. (author)The swift deformations of flagella and cilia are crucial for locomotion and fluid transport on the micron scale. Most hydrodynamic models of flagellar and ciliary flows assume the zero Reynolds number limit and model the flow using Stokes equations. Recent work has demonstrated that this quasi-steady approximation breaks down at increasing...journal article 2021
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Amador, G.J. (author), Wei, D. (author), Tam, D.S.W. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)The flagella of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii possess fibrous ultrastructures of a nanometer-scale thickness known as mastigonemes. These structures have been widely hypothesized to enhance flagellar thrust; however, detailed hydrodynamic analysis supporting this claim is lacking. In this study, we present a comprehensive investigation into the...journal article 2020
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Yu, K. (author), Balasubramanian, S. (author), Pahlavani, H. (author), Mirzaali, Mohammad J. (author), Zadpoor, A.A. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)Natural materials, such as nacre and silk, exhibit both high strength and toughness due to their hierarchical structures highly organized at the nano-, micro-, and macroscales. Bacterial cellulose (BC) presents a hierarchical fibril structure at the nanoscale. At the microscale, however, BC nanofibers are distributed randomly. Here, BC self...journal article 2020
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Liang, K. (author), Spiesz, E.M. (author), Schmieden, D.T. (author), Xu, An Wu (author), Meyer, Anne S. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)Graphene oxide (GO) has recently been highlighted as a promising multipurpose two-dimensional material. However, free-standing graphene oxide films suffer from poor strength and flexibility, which limits scaling-up of production and lifetime structural robustness in applications. Inspired by the relationship between the organic and inorganic...journal article 2020
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Dias Ribeiro de Carvalho, V.I. (author), Prabudiansyah, I. (author), Kovacik, Lubomir (author), Chami, Mohamed (author), Kieffer, R.Y. (author), van der Valk, R.A. (author), De Lange, Nick (author), Engel, Andreas (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)AAA+ proteases are degradation machines that use ATP hydrolysis to unfold protein substrates and translocate them through a central pore toward a degradation chamber. FtsH, a bacterial membrane-anchored AAA+ protease, plays a vital role in membrane protein quality control. How substrates reach the FtsH central pore is an open key question...journal article 2020
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Yu, K. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)Bioinspired bacterial cellulose (BC) composites are next-generation renewable materials that exhibit promising industrial applications. However, large-scale production of inorganic/organic BC composites by in situ fermentation remains difficult. The methods based on BC mechanical disintegration impair the mechanical property of dried BC films...journal article 2020
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Ghoddoosi Dehnavi, P. (author), Wei, D. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Tam, D.S.W. (author)Abstract: In the study of micro-scale biological flows, velocimetry methods based on passive tracers, such as micro-PIV and micro-PTV, are well established to characterize steady flows. However, these methods become inappropriate for measuring unsteady flows of small amplitude, because, on these scales, the motion of passive tracers cannot be...journal article 2020
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Hennige, Sebastian J. (author), Wolfram, Uwe (author), Wickes, Leslie (author), Murray, Fiona (author), Roberts, J. Murray (author), Kamenos, Nicholas A. (author), Schofield, Sebastian (author), Groetsch, Alexander (author), Spiesz, E.M. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Etnoyer, Peter J. (author)Ocean acidification is a threat to the net growth of tropical and deep-sea coral reefs, due to gradual changes in the balance between reef growth and loss processes. Here we go beyond identification of coral dissolution induced by ocean acidification and identify a mechanism that will lead to a loss of habitat in cold-water coral reef...journal article 2020
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Spiesz, E.M. (author), Schmieden, D.T. (author), Grande, Antonio M. (author), Liang, K. (author), Schwiedrzik, Jakob (author), Natalio, Filipe (author), Michler, Johann (author), Garcia, Santiago J. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Meyer, Anne S. (author)The impressive mechanical properties of natural composites, such as nacre, arise from their multiscale hierarchical structures, which span from nano- to macroscale and lead to effective energy dissipation. While some synthetic bioinspired materials have achieved the toughness of natural nacre, current production methods are complex and...journal article 2019
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Wei, D. (author), Ghoddoosi Dehnavi, P. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Tam, D.S.W. (author)Stokes equations are commonly used to model the hydrodynamic flow around cilia on the micron scale. The validity of the zero Reynolds number approximation is investigated experimentally with a flow velocimetry approach based on optical tweezers, which allows the measurement of periodic flows with high spatial and temporal resolution. We find...journal article 2019
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Balasubramanian, S. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author), Meyer, Anne S. (author)Bacterial biofilms are three-dimensional networks of cells entangled in a self-generated extracellular polymeric matrix composed of proteins, lipids, polysaccharides, and nucleic acids. Biofilms can establish themselves on virtually any accessible surface and lead to varying impacts ranging from infectious diseases to degradation of toxic...journal article 2019
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Dols Perez, A. (author), Marin Lizarraga, V.M. (author), Amador, G.J. (author), Kieffer, R.Y. (author), Tam, D.S.W. (author), Aubin-Tam, M.E. (author)Cell lipid membranes are the site of vital biological processes, such as motility, trafficking, and sensing, many of which involve mechanical forces. Elucidating the interplay between such bioprocesses and mechanical forces requires the use of tools that apply and measure piconewton-level forces, e.g., optical tweezers. Here, we introduce the...journal article 2019
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