Abstract
The physico-chemical processes supporting life’s purposeful movement remain essentially unknown. Self-propelling chiral droplets offer a minimalistic model of swimming cells and, in surfactant-rich water, droplets of chiral nematic liquid crystals follow the threads of a screw. We demonstrate that the geometry of their trajectory is determined by both the number of turns in, and the handedness of, their spiral organization. Using molecular motors as photo-invertible chiral dopants allows converting between right-handed and left-handed trajectories dynamically, and droplets subjected to such an inversion reorient in a direction that is also encoded by the number of spiral turns. This motile behavior stems from dynamic transmission of chirality, from the artificial molecular motors to the liquid crystal in confinement and eventually to the helical trajectory, in analogy with the chirality-operated motion and reorientation of swimming cells and unicellular organisms.
Highlights
The physico-chemical processes supporting life’s purposeful movement remain essentially unknown
The asymmetric structure of the motors is transmitted to liquid crystals and small concentrations of motor can transform an achiral liquid crystal into a chiral nematic liquid crystal that is characterized by a helical organization of the molecules
The helical motion of spiral droplets in surfactant-rich water is determined by their handedness and by the confinement of the liquid crystal helix in the droplets
Summary
The physico-chemical processes supporting life’s purposeful movement remain essentially unknown. 1234567890():,; In the search for creating molecular systems with life-like qualities, droplets, proto-cellular constructs, and other smallscale motile entities have been designed and synthesized[1,2,3,4,5] that display chemotaxis[6], phototaxis[7,8], oscillatory motion[9,10], and are able to swim in water with a temperature-responsive velocity[11] These motile systems have yet to demonstrate the sophisticated and purposeful behavior of their living counterparts[12], and, in particular, encoding directionality from the molecular level upwards has remained elusive. Recent work has shown that such chiral droplets follow helical trajectories in surfactant-rich water[37], based on the observation that instabilities can form when micelles solubilize oils from droplets in water[38,39,40]
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