Abstract

Metachronal waves commonly exist in natural cilia carpets. These emergent phenomena, which originate from phase differences between neighbouring self-beating cilia, are essential for biological transport processes including locomotion, liquid pumping, feeding, and cell delivery. However, studies of such complex active systems are limited, particularly from the experimental side. Here we report magnetically actuated, soft, artificial cilia carpets. By stretching and folding onto curved templates, programmable magnetization patterns can be encoded into artificial cilia carpets, which exhibit metachronal waves in dynamic magnetic fields. We have tested both the transport capabilities in a fluid environment and the locomotion capabilities on a solid surface. This robotic system provides a highly customizable experimental platform that not only assists in understanding fundamental rules of natural cilia carpets, but also paves a path to cilia-inspired soft robots for future biomedical applications.

Highlights

  • Metachronal waves commonly exist in natural cilia carpets

  • Metachronal waves are self-organized rhythmic patterns appearing in systems with large numbers of hair-like structures, typically found in motile cilia on sea animals and microorganisms[1,2], hairs on epidermal surfaces[3], and the legs of walking millipedes[4]

  • Motile cilia first beat in metachronal waves to create large fluidic vortices to focus micrometre-sized particles into the sheltered zone

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Summary

Introduction

Metachronal waves commonly exist in natural cilia carpets. These emergent phenomena, which originate from phase differences between neighbouring self-beating cilia, are essential for biological transport processes including locomotion, liquid pumping, feeding, and cell delivery. By stretching and folding onto curved templates, programmable magnetization patterns can be encoded into artificial cilia carpets, which exhibit metachronal waves in dynamic magnetic fields We have tested both the transport capabilities in a fluid environment and the locomotion capabilities on a solid surface. The cilia band can be switched to beat in opposite directions, controlling vortex arrays around the animal, which provides a unique advantage in complex environments To date, these emergent phenomena of cilia carpets, including metachronal waves, are primarily studied through numerical simulations[5,15,16,17,18] and observations of natural ciliated organisms[3,13,14,19]. Tsumori et al demonstrated metachronal waves in two-dimensions by an assembly of pre-fabricated cilia hairs[30]

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