Subra Suresh's research while affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other places

Publications (159)

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Plant leaves, whose remarkable ability for morphogenesis results in a wide range of petal and leaf shapes in response to environmental cues, have inspired scientific studies as well as the development of engineering structures and devices. Although some typical shape changes in plants and the driving force for such shape evolution have been extensi...
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Recent studies have reported the experimental discovery that nanoscale specimens of even a natural material, such as diamond, can be deformed elastically to as much as 10% tensile elastic strain at room temperature without the onset of permanent damage or fracture. Computational work combining ab initio calculations and machine learning (ML) algori...
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The spleen clears altered red blood cells (RBCs) from circulation, contributing to the balance between RBC formation (erythropoiesis) and removal. The splenic RBC retention and elimination occur predominantly in open circulation where RBCs flow through macrophages and inter-endothelial slits (IESs). The mechanisms underlying and interconnecting the...
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With the increasing use of soft and flexible electronics, there is a growing need to develop substrate materials that mitigate potential environmental risks associated with non‐degradable electronics waste from synthetic substrate materials. To address this issue, the authors develop a novel, 2D plant‐based substrate termed “sporosubstrate”, which...
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Although paperless technologies are becoming ubiquitous, paper and paper‐based materials remain one of the most widely used resources, predicted to exceed an annual total of 460 million metric tons by 2030. Given the environmental challenges, deleterious impact on natural resources, and waste associated with conventional wood‐based paper manufactur...
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Characterizing internal structures and defects in materials is a challenging task, often requiring solutions to inverse problems with unknown topology, geometry, material properties, and nonlinear deformation. Here, we present a general framework based on physics-informed neural networks for identifying unknown geometric and material parameters. By...
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Introduction As highly sophisticated intercellular communication vehicles in biological systems, extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been investigated as both promising liquid biopsy-based disease biomarkers and drug delivery carriers. Despite tremendous progress in understanding their biological and physiological functions, mechanical characterizati...
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The controlled introduction of elastic strains is an appealing strategy for modulating the physical properties of semiconductor materials. With the recent discovery of large elastic deformation in nanoscale specimens as diverse as silicon and diamond, employing this strategy to improve device performance necessitates first-principles computations o...
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Significance Most shape-morphing materials rely on nonrenewable fossil resources or finely extracted biomaterials, which need strict reaction control, elaborate processing equipment, or prefabricated templates to achieve controllable transformation. To circumvent these challenges, we developed an eco-friendly and scalable strategy for programmable...
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Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are key mediators of communication among cells, and clinical utilities of EVs-based biomarkers remain limited due to difficulties in isolating EVs from whole blood reliably. We report a novel inertial-based microfluidic platform for direct isolation of nanoscale EVs (exosomes, 50 to 200 nm) and medium-sized EVs (microve...
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Significance Microfluidics is an important in vitro platform to gain insights into mechanics of blood flow and mechanisms of pathophysiology of human diseases. Extraction of 3D fields in microfluidics with dense cell suspensions remains a formidable challenge. We present artificial-intelligence velocimetry (AIV) as a general platform to determine 3...
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Significance Identifying the conditions for complete metallization of diamond solely through mechanical strain is an important scientific objective and technological demonstration. Through quantum mechanical calculations, continuum mechanics simulations validated by experiments, and machine learning, we show here that reversible metallization can b...
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Significance Much progress has been made in developing bioinspired sensors and actuators based on engineered synthetic materials, although there remains a critical need to incorporate cost-effective and eco-friendly materials. Here naturally abundant pollen grains are used as a material template to produce paper that sensitively and reversibly resp...
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Pollen’s practically-indestructible shell structure has long inspired the biomimetic design of organic materials. However, there is limited understanding of how the mechanical, chemical, and adhesion properties of pollen are biologically controlled and whether strategies can be devised to manipulate pollen beyond natural performance limits. Here, w...
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Instrumented indentation has been developed and widely utilized as one of the most versatile and practical means of extracting mechanical properties of materials. This method is particularly desirable for those applications where it is difficult to experimentally determine the mechanical properties using stress–strain data obtained from coupon spec...
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Significance The mechanisms underlying degradation of biological cells due to mechanical fatigue are not well understood. Specifically, detrimental effects of fatigue on properties and homeostasis of human red blood cells (RBCs), as they repeatedly deform while traversing microvasculature, have remained largely unexplored. We present a general micr...
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Significance Deforming a material to a large extent without inelastic relaxation can result in unprecedented properties. However, the optimal deformation state is buried within the vast continua of choices available in the strain space. Here we advance a unique and powerful strategy to circumvent conventional trial-and-error methods, and adopt arti...
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Cyclic stresses generally lead to fatigue damage and failure with important implications for material and component design, safety, performance and lifetime costs in major structural applications. Here we present unique results for copper to demonstrate that a thin superficial layer of graded surface nanostructure over a coarse-grained core suppres...
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Significance Plant leaves and flower petals in nature exhibit a wide variety of complex 3D shapes. Formation of these shapes has largely been studied from genetic and biomolecular viewpoints, overlooking contributions from biophysical factors such as mechanical stress and deformation. By means of computational simulations and quantitative analyses...
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Significance Patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) suffer from painful vasoocclusive crises. Polymerization of sickle hemoglobin (HbS) in RBCs is generally considered a major contributor to such crisis events. Here, we present the simultaneous and synergistic coupling of adhesion and HbS polymerization. We show that the age of RBCs in circulation...
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Significance The interendothelial slit (IES) is the narrowest circulatory pathway in the human spleen where aged and diseased red blood cells (RBCs) are filtered. We use a two-component RBC model to probe the dynamics of healthy and diseased RBCs traversing IES. Our simulations reveal that the spleen not only senses and clears RBCs with abnormal sh...
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In article number 1801131, Ming Dao, Tony Jun Huang, and co‐workers develop an acoustofluidic device design, which employs an acoustic enclosure and a divider, and enables the isolation of rare circulating tumor cells from peripheral blood in high throughput while preserving their structural, biological, and functional integrity.
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The study of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) offers pathways to develop new diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers that benefit cancer treatments. In order to fully exploit and interpret the information provided by CTCs, the development of a platform is reported that integrates acoustics and microfluidics to isolate rare CTCs from peripheral blood in...
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Small, smooth, and bendable diamonds If you manage to deform a diamond, it usually means you have broken it. Diamonds have very high hardness, but they do not deform elastically. This limits their usefulness for some applications. However, Banerjee et al. discovered that diamond nanoneedles can deform elastically after all (see the Perspective by L...
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Significance We demonstrate a unique growth mode to form complex 3D shapes in hydrogels by invoking the bottom-up approach analogous to cell enlargement and proliferation found in living animal tissues and plants. For this purpose, we control the oxygen concentration to modulate polymerization of monomers in porous hydrogel, wherein postgelation ne...
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Coherent twin boundaries (CTBs) are internal interfaces that can play a key role in markedly enhancing the strength of metallic materials while preserving their ductility. They are known to accommodate plastic deformation primarily through their migration, while experimental evidence documenting large-scale sliding of CTBs to facilitate deformation...
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Significance We have developed a unique, integrated, on-chip technology that is capable of isolating exosomes or other types of extracellular vesicles, directly from undiluted whole-blood samples in an automated fashion. Automated exosome isolation enables biohazard containment, short processing time, reproducible results with little human interven...
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Using a common-path interferometric technique, we measure biomechanical and morphological properties of individual red blood cells in SCD patients as a function of cell density, and investigate the correlation of these biophysical properties with drug intake as well as other clinically measured parameters.
Data
Simulation of RBC morphological sickling and unsickling process under controlled transient hypoxic conditions in shear flow. (MP4)
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A stiff sickle RBC flows through blockages. It just moves toward the blockage and get stuck there. (MP4)
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Simulation of individual sickle RBC (Sickle 2, sim) traveling through the microgates in a flipping motion, causing a rapidly persistent occlusion. (MP4)
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Simulation of sickle RBCs flowing in capillary-like microenvironment under transient hypoxic conditions. The hypoxia-affected RBCs become stiffer than other RBCs, so they tend to get stuck at the microgates, and block the blood flow. (MP4)
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Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a highly complex genetic blood disorder in which red blood cells (RBC) exhibit heterogeneous morphology changes and decreased deformability. We employ a kinetic model for cell morphological sickling that invokes parameters derived from patient-specific data. This model is used to investigate the dynamics of individual s...
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Simulation of stiff sickle RBC moving toward one trapped sickle RBC and eventually stopped nearby. (MP4)
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Individual sickle RBC (Sickle 2, exp) travels through the microgates in a translational motion, causing sequential transient occlusion before a completely blockage at the microgates (persistent occlusion). (MP4)
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An individual sickle RBC (Sickle 1, exp; red arrow) travels through the microgates in a translational motion, causing a transient occlusion before moving out the capillary-like microenvironment. The movie also shows that another individual sickle RBC (Sickle 3, exp; yellow arrow) travels through the microgates in a flipping motion, leading to a per...
Data
Simulation of individual sickle RBC (Sickle 1, sim) traveling through the microgates in a translational motion, causing a transient occlusion before a completely blockage at the microgates. (MP4)
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Significance Small unilamellar vesicles formed via self-assembly of phospholipids or block copolymers have been investigated in the context of human physiology and biomedical research. Here, we present both energetics and thermodynamics analyses that incorporate nonlinear elasticity to predict, in a unique manner, the limiting size and size distrib...
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Significance There exists a critical need for developing biomarkers reflecting clinical outcomes and for evaluating the effectiveness of treatments for sickle cell disease patients. Prior attempts to find such patient-specific markers have mostly relied upon chemical biomarkers or biophysical properties at hypoxia with limited success. We introduce...
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Significance The 3D opening of the interendothelial slit in human spleen creates a physical fitness test for red blood cells (RBCs) and clears them from circulation if their geometry and deformability are altered. We present a unique computational framework for the development of prognostic markers for diseases that alter RBC physical characteristi...
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Sickle-cell anaemia (SCA) is an inherited blood disorder exhibiting heterogeneous cell morphology and abnormal rheology, especially under hypoxic conditions. By using a multiscale red blood cell (RBC) model with parameters derived from patient-specific data, we present a mesoscopic computational study of the haemodynamic and rheological characteris...
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Significance We present 3D acoustic tweezers, which can trap and manipulate single cells and particles along three mutually orthogonal axes of motion by recourse to surface acoustic waves. We use 3D acoustic tweezers to pick up single cells, or entire cell assemblies, and deliver them to desired locations to create 2D and 3D cell patterns, or print...
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Significance Producing strong and defect-free materials is an important objective in developing many new materials. Thermal treatments aimed at defect elimination often lead to undesirable levels of strength and other properties. Although monotonic loading can reduce or even eliminate dislocations in submicroscale single crystals, such “mechanical...
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Immunodeficient mouse-human chimeras provide a powerful approach to study host specific pathogens like Plasmodium (P.) falciparum that causes human malaria. Existing mouse models of P. falciparum infection require repeated injections of human red blood cells (RBCs). In addition, clodronate lipsomes and anti-neutrophil antibodies are injected to sup...
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Significance Our coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CGMD) simulations show that the deposition of nanoscale knobs, rather than spectrin network remodeling, is the primary cause of the dramatically increased stiffness of the Plasmodium falciparum ( Pf )-infected red blood cell (RBC) membranes. Our analyses further reveal that the knobs stiffen the R...
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Significance The separation and analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) provides physicians a minimally invasive way to monitor the response of cancer patients to various treatments. Among the existing cell-separation methods, acoustic-based approaches provide significant potential to preserve the phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of sort...
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We developed a microfluidics-based model to quantify cell-level processes modulating the pathophysiology of sickle cell disease (SCD). This in vitro model enabled quantitative investigations of the kinetics of cell sickling, unsickling, and cell rheology. We created short-term and long-term hypoxic conditions to simulate normal and retarded transit...
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We present an experimental method to quantitatively characterize the mechanical properties of a large number of biological cells by introducing controlled deformation through dielectrophoresis in a microfluidic device. We demonstrate the capability of this technique by determining the force versus deformation characteristics of healthy human red bl...
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Malaria causes nearly 1 million deaths annually. Recent emergence of multidrug resistance highlights the need to develop novel therapeutic interventions against human malaria. Given the involvement of sugar binding plasmodial proteins in host invasion, we set out to identify such proteins as targets of small glycans. Combining multidisciplinary app...
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Significance We have developed a unique approach for the separation of particles and biological cells through standing surface acoustic waves oriented at an optimum angle to the fluid flow direction in a microfluidic device. This experimental setup, optimized by systematic analyses, has been used to demonstrate effective separation based on size, c...
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Nanotwinned structures offer the potential to effectively enhance strength while preserving ductility and damage tolerance. In this paper we present an analytical model for quantifying slip transfer across twin boundaries and for deriving the attendant flow stress as a function of the twin lamellae size in nanotwinned face-centered cubic metals. Th...
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Significance Study of human immune responses to malaria parasite infection has been hampered by a lack of small animal models. Although immunodeficient mice supplemented with human RBCs support human parasite infection, these animals lack a human immune system. We have overcome this obstacle by developing mice that possess both human RBCs and immun...
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Significance The formation of nanocrystals and cracks in metallic glasses subjected to cyclically varying strains in micro- and nanoscale systems is a topic of scientific and technological interest. However, no real-time studies of such phenomena in fatigued metallic glasses have thus far been reported. Here we present unique observations of nanocr...
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Hematologic disorders arising from infectious diseases, hereditary factors and environmental influences can lead to, and can be influenced by, significant changes in the shape, mechanical and physical properties of red blood cells (RBCs), and the biorheology of blood flow. Hence, modeling of hematologic disorders should take into account the multip...
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The electrical properties of biological cells have connections to their pathological states. Here we present an electric impedance microflow cytometry (EIMC) platform for the characterization of disease states of single cells. This platform entails a microfluidic device for a label-free and non-invasive cell-counting assay through electric impedanc...
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We study the biomechanical interactions between the lipid bilayer and the cytoskeleton in a red blood cell (RBC) by developing a general framework for mesoscopic simulations. We treated the lipid bilayer and the cytoskeleton as two distinct components and developed a unique whole-cell model of the RBC, using dissipative particle dynamics (DPD). The...
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Proteins exported by Plasmodium falciparum to the red blood cell (RBC) membrane modify the structural properties of the parasitized RBC (Pf-RBC). Although quasi-static single cell assays show reduced ring-stage Pf-RBCs deformability, the parameters influencing their microcirculatory behavior remain unexplored. Here, we study the dynamic properties...
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Sickle cell disease (SCD) is characterized by the abnormal deformation of red blood cells (RBCs) in the deoxygenated condition, as their elongated shape leads to compromised circulation. The pathophysiology of SCD is influenced by both the biomechanical properties of RBCs and their hemodynamic properties in the microvasculature. A major challenge i...
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We present the anisotropic light scattering of individual red blood cells (RBCs) from a patient with sickle cell disease (SCD). To measure light scattering spectra along two independent axes of elongated-shaped sickle RBCs with arbitrary orientation, we introduce the anisotropic Fourier transform light scattering (aFTLS) technique and measured both...
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Gametocyte maturation in Plasmodium falciparum is a critical step in the transmission of malaria. While the majority of parasites proliferate asexually in red blood cells, a small fraction of parasites undergo sexual conversion and mature over 2 weeks to become competent for transmission to a mosquito vector. Immature gametocytes sequester in deep...
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Red blood cells (RBCs) infected by a Plasmodium parasite in malaria may lose their membrane deformability with a relative membrane stiffening more than ten-fold in comparison with healthy RBCs leading to potential capillary occlusions. Moreover, infected RBCs are able to adhere to other healthy and parasitized cells and to the vascular endothelium...
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We present a unified mechanistic model to rationalize size-dependent flow stress, activation volume and strain-rate sensitivity for metals with either nanocrystalline grains or nanoscale twins. The non-uniform partial dislocation model for flow stress [Asaro and Suresh, Acta Mater, Vol. 53, pp. 3369–3382, 2005; Gu et al., Scripta Mater, Vol. 62, pp...
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Characterizing the dynamic mechanical properties of brain tissue is deemed important for developing a comprehensive knowledge of the mechanisms underlying brain injury. The results gathered to date on the tissue properties have been mostly obtained in vitro. Learning how these results might differ quantitatively from those encountered in vivo is a...
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We have used a microfluidic mass sensor to measure the density of single living cells. By weighing each cell in two fluids of different densities, our technique measures the single-cell mass, volume, and density of approximately 500 cells per hour with a density precision of 0.001 g mL(-1). We observe that the intrinsic cell-to-cell variation in de...
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Upon infection and development within human erythrocytes, P. falciparum induces alterations to the infected RBC morphology and bio-mechanical properties to eventually rupture the host cells through parasitic and host derived proteases of cysteine and serine families. We used previously reported broad-spectrum inhibitors (E64d, EGTA-AM and chymostat...
Data
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Re-distribution of merozoites inside iRBCs treated with protease inhibitors. P. falciparum PC-GFP line expressing cytosolic GFP was treated with DMSO, E64d, EGTA-AM and Chymostatin at 44 hpi and harvested at 46 hpi and 50–52 hpi and lysed with 5% sorbitol. Lysates from this experiment was resolved by SDS-PAGE, transferred to nitrocellulose membrane...

Citations

... In the domain of applications of biomicrofluidic devices, the separation of plasma from blood is central for blood disease diagnostics and prognosis [3,[13][14][15] as it enables the isolation of key components from blood that can correlate to a specific pathological condition. Such devices are capable of presenting a detailed picture of the physiological condition of the human body due to a myriad of biomarkers that are found in human blood plasma, with the most common being proteins [16,17], electrolytes [18], urea, and glucose [19]. Thus, the study of PDMS surface modification to enhance hydrophilicity [20,21] holds great significance for the operation of passive microfluidic devices for blood sample preparation and plasma separation. ...
... Initial efforts have been made to recapitulate core spleen-functions, such as blood filtration, from perfusion of ex-vivo spleen tissue (81) and spleen-on-chip devices using red blood cells (RBCs) (82). Intriguingly, macrophages were used in a spleen-on-chip model of sickle cell disease that revealed differences in their phagocytic capabilities between sickled red RBCs and non-sickled RBCs, under hypoxia (83). In spite of the fact that robust spleen features have been well-characterised with immune cells-on-chip, the technical developments to advance spleen-on-chip models are still at an early stage. ...
... From a biological structure perspective, pollen is composed of four layers, namely, pollenkitt, exine, intine, and cytoplasmic content (14,15). Processing of pollen grains can alter their physical and chemical properties (16), resulting in multifunctional material building blocks that have been applied in many emerging fields, such as drug delivery (17)(18)(19), tissue engineering (20,21), soft robotics (22), biosensors (23,24) and actuators (25), flexible electronics (26), and environmental remediation (27). ...
... Furthermore, using recycled and non-woody plants in paper production offers more advantages, like providing an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional wood-based paper manufacturing, reducing deforestation and CO 2 production [5,6]. Moreover, it allows for the reuse and recycling of paper, contributing to waste reduction and resource conservation [7]. ...
... Although in 3D setting these dyes display strong concentration-dependent effects on the decay time [169], they are promising tools for cancer and organoid models. Recently, viscosity measurement was also used for assessing they hypoxic damage of the extracellular vesicles (EV) in placenta [170] and resulting in altered phospholipid composition. ...
... PINNs can solve difficult problems in which local boundary conditions are missing, such as the thermal boundary conditions in heat transfer problems [6], or that rely on small displacements [7] to detect holes and defects in materials when performing inference tasks. Recently, many researchers have used PINNs in the field of fluid dynamics. ...
... digital printing of self-morphing structures (20,21) with the capability to repeatedly print and erase content on the same sheet of paper multiple times (22), as well as plant-based substrate materials for flexible green electronics (23). ...
... By doing so, the spin coherence of SiV center can be improved [6]. Secondly, since the symmetry of a material is closely connected to its energy degeneracy, when strain breaks a specific symmetry of a system, some spin transitions which are not possible without strain can be enabled [7,8], and more spin manipulation will become possible, such as the spin-spin interaction change of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) - [9] and the generation of spin relaxation path of the transition-metal dichalcogenides [10] through strain-induced symmetry breaking. In recent years, strain engineering is appearing as an effective method to modulate the quantum mechanical properties of materials, such as modulating the quantum ferroelectric polar and thus the superconducting phase and superconducting transition temperature of materials [11,12], which has been accelerating the research of high temperature superconductors [13][14][15]. ...
... There are several classic types of structures in inertial focusing: symmetrical or asymmetrical serpentine structures to focus large particles in the center of the channel and small particles on both sides of the channel [36][37][38][39], spiral structures to focus the particles at different locations near the inner side wall [40][41][42], and shrinkage and expansion structures to separate the particles of different sizes [43], as well as combinations of different structures [44,45]. ...
... Quantitative monitoring of three-dimensional hemodynamic activity holds tremendous value in analyzing the biophysical and physiological basis of vascular diseases, comprehending the mechanisms of onset and progression of the disease, especially stroke, aneurysm, and diabetic retinopathy [1][2][3]. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a powerful imaging technique that has transformed the ability to visualize biological tissues with high resolution and contrast [4], which has emerged as a promising tool for measuring blood flow dynamics in vivo, providing a quantitative assessment of blood flow velocities in a range of tissues and organs. Doppler OCT is a commonly used modality that can directly detect blood flow velocity by analyzing the frequency shift [5] or phase difference [6] of light scattered by moving red blood cells. ...