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Conference: PhysCell2012

Soft Matter is delighted to offer a poster prize at the meeting “Pierre-Gille de Gennes days on Physics of cells: From soft to living matter” taking place 2nd – 9th September 2012, in Hyeres on the Mediterranean coast of France. 

The aim of the meeting is to bring together eminent researchers from interdisciplinary fields working on various aspects of cell and tissue biophysics including adhesion, mechanics, mechano-sensing, morphogenesis, transport, single molecule studies among others.

An advanced school, aimed at graduate students as well as researchers at the interface of biology with physical sciences, will precede the conference. Scientific sessions will include membranes, single molecules, adhesion and mechanics, cytoskeleton, gene expression, tissues and morphogenesis, bacterial motility, intracellular traffic, and emerging tools and techniques. 

More information is available on the meeting website: http://www.physcell2012.com

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Important information regarding issues 24-30 of Soft Matter

I have to inform you of a problem regarding issues 24-30 of volume 8 of Soft Matter.

Unfortunately, an error was made which has resulted in articles published in these seven issues having the wrong page numbers. We would like to apologise to our authors and readers and assure you that we are doing everything we can to rectify this error as quickly as possible.

We will be republishing the articles with the correct page numbers by 3rd August and all authors of affected articles have been notified individually. The hard copies of the issues will be reprinted and distributed to our print subscribers. We will be publishing an appended addition and correction to each of the affected articles, as well as notices on the website to ensure readers are aware of the situation. We will also be coordinating with abstracting and indexing services such as ISI Web of Science and Scopus to make certain citations are not affected. Steps are also being put in place so this error cannot occur in the future.

We appreciate your patience and once again sincerely apologise for any inconvenience or confusion caused. If you wish to cite one of articles affected before the corrected version is published, please use the DOI.

If you would like to discuss this matter further, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Liz Davies
Editor, Soft Matter

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Top 10 most-read Soft Matter articles in May

This month sees the following articles in Soft Matter that are in the top ten most accessed for May:

Design of patchy particles using ternary self-assembled monolayers 
Inés C. Pons-Siepermann and Sharon C. Glotzer  
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 6226-6231 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM00014H 

Mechanics of morphological instabilities and surface wrinkling in soft materials: a review 
Bo Li, Yan-Ping Cao, Xi-Qiao Feng and Huajian Gao  
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 5728-5745 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM00011C 

Self-assembled hierarchical structure evolution of azobenzene-containing linear-dendritic liquid crystalline block copolymers 
Zehua Shi, Dongzhong Chen, Huanjun Lu, Bin Wu, Jie Ma, Rongshi Cheng, Jianglin Fang and Xiaofang Chen  
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 6174-6184 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM07249A 

Tunable plasmonic nanostructures from noble metal nanoparticles and stimuli-responsive polymers 
Ihor Tokarev and Sergiy Minko 
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 5980-5987 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25069A 

Self-assembly of biodegradable polyurethanes for controlled delivery applications 
Mingming Ding, Jiehua Li, Hong Tan and Qiang Fu  
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 5414-5428 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM07402H 

Thermoresponsive supramolecular dendronized copolymers with tunable phase transition temperatures 
Jiatao Yan, Xiaoqian Zhang, Wen Li, Xiuqiang Zhang, Kun Liu, Peiyi Wu and Afang Zhang  
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 6371-6377 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25285F 

Dual pH-triggered physical gels prepared from mixed dispersions of oppositely charged pH-responsive microgels 
James McParlane, Damien Dupin, Jennifer M. Saunders, Sarah Lally, Steven P. Armes and Brian R. Saunders  
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 6239-6247 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25581B 

Design and properties of supramolecular polymer gels 
Atsushi Noro, Mikihiro Hayashi and Yushu Matsushita  
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 2416-2429 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25144B 

Membrane properties of swollen vesicles: growth, rupture, and fusion 
Chun-Min Lin, David T. Wu, Heng-Kwong Tsao and Yu-Jane Sheng  
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 6139-6150 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25518A 

Non-affine deformations in polymer hydrogels 
Qi Wen, Anindita Basu, Paul A. Janmey and Arjun G. Yodh  
Soft Matter, 2012, Advance Article 
DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25364J 

Why not take a look at the articles today and blog your thoughts and comments below.

Fancy submitting an article to Soft Matter? Then why not submit to us today!

To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign up for the Soft Matter e-Alert or RSS feeds or follow Soft Matter on Twitter or Facebook.

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What makes research biomimetic, bioinspired or biokleptic?

Sarah Staniland and co-workers discuss the meaning of the term ‘biomimetic’, and how it differs or overlaps between disciplines. How does a physicist define biomimetics, compared to a biologist? The irridescence of butterfly wings to tiny magnetic organisms are all discussed in this interesting and thoughtful Opinion piece.

Read for free for a short time:

Innovation through imitation: biomimetic, bioinspired and biokleptic research
Andrea E. Rawlings,  Jonathan P. Bramble and Sarah S. Staniland
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 2675-2679, DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25385B

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Reviews in Soft Matter

Soft MatterSoft Matter publishes five different types of review-style article: Emerging Areas, Highlights, Opinions, Reviews and Tutorial Reviews. We’ve created an easy search to show examples of each of the different article types. Please click on the links below to see the recent reviews published in Soft Matter.

Review-style articles:

  • Highlight
  • Review Article
  • Emerging Area
  • Opinion
  • Tutorial Review
  • Guidelines for writing review articles can be found here: http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/sm/review_guidelines.asp

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    Don’t forget Soft Matter Principles of Microfluidics Themed Issue: Submission deadline 21th April

    Soft Matter is publishing a themed issue on the ‘Soft Matter Principles of Microfluidics’ with Professor Lydéric Bocquet (University of Lyon, France), Professor Todd Squires (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) and Professor Annie Colin (Rhodia-Bordeaux1-CNRS, Bordeaux, France) acting as the guest editors.

    Microfluidics has provided powerful experimental capabilities for the study of soft matter, and enabled experiments in this field that had previously been impossible.  Viewing clean-room microfabrication  facilities as an advanced machine shop — where your device literally emerges from your design — microfluidics enables unprecedented control over experimental conditions, such as flow types and rates in an experiment, the ability to heat and cool rapidly, to watch systems equilibrate or evolve physically or chemically, and to design an experiment to specifically isolate a particular scientific process or question. Furthermore, the small scale of microfluidic experiments enables systematic sweeps of many experimental systems, while consuming very little sample. Benefiting from fast thermal exchanges and a perfect control of residence time, microfluidics has provided new routes to process and tailor soft materials whose fabrication had been out of reach until only recently. Like the cell phone in your pocket, microfluidics has become an essential tool in most soft matter labs. It is therefore a proper time to draw a state-of-the-art picture of the intimate connections which have developed between soft matter and microfluidics: this is the aim of this themed issue Soft Matter: principles of microfluidics. By bringing together contributions from the various domains where ‘microfluidics meet soft matter’, we will obtain an impressionist view of the possibilities offered by microfluidics in soft matter and imagine the new avenues of this rapidly evolving field.

    All manuscripts will be handled by the Soft Matter Editorial office and refereed in accordance to the standard procedures of the journal, and in this respect invited articles will be treated in the same way as regular submissions to the journal.

     The deadline for the receipt of manuscripts for this themed issue is: 21th April 2012

    Manuscripts can be submitted using the RSC’s on-line submissions service. Please contact to the editorial office if you are interested in contributing to this issue. All contributions should state in the covering letter and “comments to editors” section during submission that the manuscript is submitted for the themed issue on Soft Matter Principles of Microfluidics.

    To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign up for the Soft Matter e-Alert or RSS feeds or follow Soft Matter on Twitter or Facebook.

    Like Soft Matter on FacebookFollow Soft Matter on Twitter

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    Boulder Summer School: Polymers in Soft and Biological Matter, July 9 – August 3, 2012

    Founded by physical chemists like Flory and brought into the mainstream of theoretical physics by visionaries like de Gennes, over the last eighty years polymer physics has grown into a mature, rich, and exciting discipline. Now expanded to include also colloids, liquid crystals, interfaces, etc, polymer and soft matter physics span fundamental statistical mechanics and field theory, most advanced materials, as well as technological and biological frontiers. Nevertheless, a comprehensive exposition to fundamental concepts of polymer and soft matter science is still largely missing, neglected in most physics departments, ignored by many workers in biological realm, and underappreciated even by chemical engineers. The goal of this year’s Boulder summer school is to fill this gap and provide the physics community with a relatively comprehensive course in the fundamentals of polymer and soft matter physics with emphasis on their biological applications.

    Scientific Coordinators
    Alexander Grosberg, New York University
    Michael Rubinstein, University of North Carolina
    Eugenia Kumacheva, University of Toronto
    Leo Radzihovsky, University of Colorado

    Expected lecturers and seminar speakers
    Paul Chaikin (New York),  Noel Clark (Boulder),  Alexei Finkelstein (Moscow),  Daan Frenkel (Cambridge),  Alexander Grosberg (New York),  Jean-Francois Joanny (Institute Curie),  Kurt Kremer (Mainz),  Eugenia Kumacheva (Toronto),  Frederick MacKintosh (Amsterdam),  Tom McLeish (Durham),  Philip Pincus (Santa Barbara),  David Pine (New York),  Michael Rubinstein (Chapel Hill),  Samuel Safran (Weizmann Institute),  David Weitz (Harvard),  Ekaterina Zhulina (Pittsburgh)

     
    For further information please email: boulder.organizer2012@yale.edu or visit the Boulder summer school website.

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    Soft Matter Poster Prize: 3rd International Congress on Biohydrogels

    Sharad Pasale in front on his posterCongratulations to Sharad Pasale for winning a Soft Matter poster prize at the recent 3rd International Congress on Biohydrogels.

    Sharad Pasale’s winning poster was titled:

    Synthesis of biodegradable and thermoresponsive hydrogel via RAFT polymerization and click chemistry for tissue engineering.

    To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign up for the Soft Matter e-Alert or RSS feeds or follow Soft Matter on Twitter or Facebook.Soft Matter on FacebookSoft Matter news on Twitter

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    Soft Matter article on self-folding of polymer sheets is highlighted in New Scientist

    The story in New Scientist (Pulse of light creates instant origami) has a short video which nicely shows the polymer sheet folding into 3 dimensional structures.  

    The paper by Michael Dickey, Jan Genzer and co-workers was also covered by Chemistry World (Shrinky Dink origami powered by heat).

    Graphical abstract: Self-folding of polymer sheets using local light absorption

    … And finally here’s the original research paper

    Self-folding of polymer sheets using local light absorption
    Y Liu, J K Boyles, J Genzer and M Dickey
    Soft Matter, 2011
    DOI: 10.1039/c1sm06564e

    Don’t forget, you can keep up-to-date with all the latest research from Soft Matter via the Soft Matter e-Alert or RSS feeds or follow Soft Matter on Twitter or Facebook

    News from Soft Matter on FacebookNews from Soft Matter on Twitter

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    Running and tumbling

    In a recent talk, Sravanti Uppaluri discussed her work looking at the motility of Trypanosoma brucei brucei and how this affects the swimming motion of the parasites. The results have been published in PLoS Computational Biology.

    Trypanosomes are bloodstream parasites. Found in Africa (T. Brucei) and South America (T. cruzi) , trypanosomes infect mammals via an insect vector. In Africa, this is the tsetse fly and infection results in the potentially fatal disease African trypanosomiasis, more commonly known as sleeping sickness. The parasite intially enters the blood stream before passing through the blood-brain barrier and invading the central nervous system.

    Trypanosomes swim using a flagellum, which runs along the length of the cell. Uppaluri found that swimming cells have three different motility modes: tumbling walkers, persistent walkers and intermediate walkers. These motility modes correlate with the shape of the cell and their mean end-to-end length. Tumblers have no persistence in direction and no well-defined orientation. In the videos Uppaluri showed, the cells appeared to move in small circles or knots going nowhere. Persistent walkers on the other hand are highly directional; they swim for hundreds of micrometres without changing their trajectory. The cells are orientated, with the flagellum tip leading in the swimming direction. For persistent walkers, the cells appear stretched or elongated, with a mean end-to-end length 1.5 times greater than that of tumblers, which appear more bent. No tumbling is observed for persistent walkers. Intermediate walkers have an intermediate behaviour with periods of directional swimming interspersed with periods of tumbling.

    Uppaluri suggests that the different motility modes arise from variations in the cell stiffness, with persistent cells having three times more flexural rigidity than tumblers. The flagellum of persistent walkers were also found to move at around twice the velocity of tumbling walkers.

    The motility mode and cell properties may play a role in tissue invasion of the trypanosomes, when they pass through the blood-brain barrier. They may also be important for finding nutrients or removing host antibodies. Further work, however, is required before any definite conclusions can be made.

     

     
     
     
     
     
     

    SEM of a red blood cell (red) and a T. cyclops (green). T. cyclops infects Monkeys and is found in South-east Asia. It has a very similar form to T. brucei. T. cyclops is not, however, infectious to man.

    Related papers in Soft Matter

    Effect of helicity on wrapping and bundling of semi-flexible filaments twirled in a viscous fluid, S. Clark and R. Prabhakar, 2011 (doi:10.1039/C1SM05269A).

    Colloids in a bacterial bath: simulations and experiments, C. Valeriani, M. Li, J. Novosel, J. Arlt and D. Marenduzzo (doi:10.1039/C1SM05260H).

    Image taken from: Separation of parasites from human blood using deterministic lateral displacement,  S.H. Holm et al., Lab Chip, 2011, 11, 1326-1332, (doi:10.1039/c0lc00560f).

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