Published August 26, 2019 | Version Accepted Version + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Macroscale Chemotaxis from a Swarm of Bacteria-Mimicking Nanoswimmers

  • 1. ROR icon Harbin Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Inspired by the dynamics of bacterial swarming, we report a swarm of polymer‐brush‐grafted, glucose‐oxidase‐powered Janus gold nanoswimmers with a positive, macroscale chemotactic behavior. These nanoswimmers are prepared through the grafting of polymer brushes onto one side of gold nanoparticles, followed by functionalization with glucose oxidase on the other side. The resulting polymer‐brush‐functionalized Janus gold nanoswimmers exhibit efficient propulsion with a velocity of up to approximately 120 body lengths s−1 in the presence of glucose. The comparative analysis of their kinematic behavior reveals that the grafted polymer brushes significantly improve the translational diffusion of Janus gold nanoswimmers. Particularly, these bacteria‐mimicking Janus gold nanoswimmers display a collectively chemotactic motion along the concentration gradient of a glucose resource, which could be observed at the macroscale.

Additional Information

© 2019 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. Manuscript received: June 21, 2019; Accepted manuscript online: July 8, 2019; Version of record online: July 25, 2019. We appreciate the help of Prof. Luru Dai for the STROM characterization. This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21674029, 21603047, and 21573053), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (2016M590286). The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Accepted Version - He_et_al-2019-Angewandte_Chemie_International_Edition.pdf

Supplemental Material - anie201907733-s1-si-he.docx

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
97024
DOI
10.1002/anie.201907733
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20190710-093408046

Related works

Describes
10.1002/anie.201907733 (DOI)

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China
21674029
National Natural Science Foundation of China
21603047
National Natural Science Foundation of China
21573053
China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
2016M590286

Dates

Created
2019-07-10
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-16
Created from EPrint's last_modified field