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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 5: Membranes, Vesicles and Synthetic Life-like Systems I
BP 5.2: Vortrag
Montag, 9. März 2026, 15:15–15:30, BAR/0205
Microfluidic Micropipettes: A Chip-Based Platform for Membrane Mechanics at Scale — •Sebastian W. Krauss1, Megan Wong2, Sepideh Razavi3, Lorenzo Di Michele1, and Pietro Cicuta2 — 1Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, UK — 2Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK — 3School of Sustainable Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, University of Oklahoma, USA
The mechanical properties of lipid membranes play an important role in diverse processes, from cell interactions to diseases. Established techniques, however, often suffer from low throughput or provide only bulk mechanical readouts, such as overall stiffness, making it challenging to obtain statistically robust measurements of membrane mechanics. Here, we present a microfluidic platform incorporating hundreds of micropipette like confinements on a single chip, enabling parallel mechanical characterisation of giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) in a single experiment. The forces acting on the membrane can be precisely tuned via the applied flow rates and the custom channel geometries, allowing well-defined, controllable mechanical testing. The platform also enables in situ exposure of GUVs to membrane-active compounds, such as surfactants, facilitating direct observation of their impact on membrane mechanics, including the dynamics and reversibility of these effects. This high-throughput approach opens the possibility for systematic screening of compound libraries, providing a quantitative framework to study the interactions between solutes and their impact on membranes.
Keywords: Lab-on-a-Chip; Micropipette; Vesicle; Membrane; Microfluidics