Theeyancheri Ligesh, Sahoo Rajiblochan, Kumar Praveen, Chakrabarti Rajarshi
Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400076, India.
ACS Omega. 2022 Sep 15;7(38):33637-33650. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.2c04709. eCollection 2022 Sep 27.
Active systems are made of agents, each of which takes energy from the environment and converts it to directed motion. Therefore, by construction, these systems function out of equilibrium and cannot be described using equilibrium statistical mechanics. Though the most studied aspect has been the collective motion of active particles, the motion at the individual particle level in crowded media is also of prime importance. Examples include the motion of bacteria in hydrogels, single cell migration as a way to search for food or escape from toxic agents, and synthetic active agents transporting through soft crowded media. This review presents an overview of our understanding of single active probe dynamics in crowded media from computer simulations. The active probe is a Janus or a dumbbell-shaped particle, and the medium is made of crowders that are either sticky or repulsive to the probe and could be frozen or mobile. The density and the topology of the crowders also play an important role. We hope our in silico studies will help to elucidate the mechanism of activity-driven transport in crowded media in general and design nanomachines for targeted delivery.
活性系统由主体组成，每个主体从环境中获取能量并将其转化为定向运动。因此，从构造上来说，这些系统在非平衡状态下运行，无法用平衡态统计力学来描述。尽管研究最多的方面是活性粒子的集体运动，但在拥挤介质中单个粒子层面的运动也至关重要。例子包括水凝胶中细菌的运动、单细胞作为寻找食物或逃离有毒物质的一种迁移方式，以及合成活性剂在柔软拥挤介质中的传输。本综述从计算机模拟的角度概述了我们对拥挤介质中单个活性探针动力学的理解。活性探针是一个两面神粒子或哑铃形粒子，介质由对探针有粘性或排斥性的拥挤粒子组成，这些拥挤粒子可以是固定的或可移动的。拥挤粒子的密度和拓扑结构也起着重要作用。我们希望我们的计算机模拟研究将有助于阐明一般情况下拥挤介质中活性驱动传输的机制，并设计用于靶向递送的纳米机器。
