Microswimmers and microfluidics: applications from health and environment to agriculture

V.I. MARCONI

Punta del Este

Congreso; Dynamics Days Latin America and the Caribbean; 2018

In Physics the nonlinearities dominate most of problems and applications as they do in LifeSciences, but a distinctive feature in biological science is the huge number of DNA molecules,proteins, cells, organisms in a population, organs, and so on. And even more, the immensenumber of items being studied in the life sciences are heterogeneous, rather than homogeneousas in the physical sciences, and in addition they interact mostly nonlinearly.In our numerical and experimental multidisciplinary work we aim to understand the physics ofproblems in biology. In particular we investigate the complex relation between populations ofself-propelled microorganisms and the confinement geometry in order to optimise the designof microfluidics devices for a wide number of applications: human reproduction (sperm cells),filtration and ecology (bacteria), biofertilizers and sustainable agronomy (bacteria), evolutionbiology (choanoflagellates). In all these applications, the nonlinear interactions and hetero-geneities are dominant features of the problems which will be highlighted in this presentation.