The deposition of material at the edge of evaporating droplets, known as the ‘coffee ring effect’, is caused by a radially outward capillary flow. This phenomenon is common to a wide array of systems including colloidal and bacterial systems. The role of surfactants in counteracting these coffee ring depositions is related to the occurrence of local vortices known as Marangoni eddies. Here we show that these swirling flows are universal, and not only lead to a uniform deposition of colloids but also occur in living bacterial systems. Experiments on Pseudomonas aeruginosa suggest that the auto-production of biosurfactants has an essential role in creating a homogeneous deposition of the bacteria upon drying. Moreover, at biologically relevant conditions, intricate time-dependent flows are observed in addition to the vortex regime, which are also effective in reversing the coffee ring effect at even lower surfactant concentrations.

Confinement of living microorganisms and self-propelled particles by an external trap provides a means of analysing the motion and behaviour of active systems. Developing a tweezer with a trapping radius large compared with the swimmers' size and run length has been an experimental challenge, as standard optical traps are too weak. Here we report the novel use of an acoustic tweezer to confine self-propelled particles in two dimensions over distances large compared with the swimmers' run length. We develop a near-harmonic trap to demonstrate the crossover from weak confinement, where the probability density is Boltzmann-like, to strong confinement, where the density is peaked along the perimeter. At high concentrations the swimmers crystallize into a close-packed structure, which subsequently ‘explodes' as a travelling wave when the tweezer is turned off. The swimmers' confined motion provides a measurement of the swim pressure, a unique mechanical pressure exerted by self-propelled bodies.

The adsorption of particles at liquid-liquid interfaces is of great scientific and technological importance. In particular for non-spherical particles, the capillary forces which drive adsorption vary with position and orientation and complex adsorption pathways have been predicted by simulations. Based on the latter it has been suggested that the time scales of adsorption are determined by a balance between capillary and viscous forces. However, several recent experimental results point out the role of contact line pinning in the adsorption of particles to interfaces, and even suggest that the adsorption dynamics and pathways are completely determined by the latter, with the timescales of adsorption being determined solely by particle characteristics. In the present work the adsorption trajectories of model ellipsoidal particles are investigated experimentally using cryo-SEM and monitoring the altitudinal orientation angle using high speed confocal microscopy. By varying the viscosity and the viscosity jump across the interfaces we specifically interrogate the role of viscous forces.

Deposition of linear DNA molecules is a critical step in many single-molecule genomic approaches including DNA mapping, fiber-FISH, and several emerging sequencing technologies. In the ideal situation, the DNA that is deposited for these experiments is absolutely linear and uniformly stretched, thereby enabling accurate distance measurements. However, this is rarely the case, and furthermore, current approaches for the capture and linearization of DNA on a surface tend to require complex surface preparation and large amounts of starting material to achieve genomic-scale mapping. This makes them technically demanding and prevents their application in emerging fields of genomics, such as single-cell based analyses. Here we describe a simple and extremely efficient approach to the deposition and linearization of genomic DNA molecules. We employ droplets containing as little as tens of picograms of material and simply drag them, using a pipet tip, over a polymer-coated coverslip. In this report we highlight one particular polymer, Zeonex, which is remarkably efficient at capturing DNA. We characterize the method of DNA capture on the Zeonex surface and find that the use of droplets greatly facilitates the efficient deposition of DNA. This is the result of a circulating flow in the droplet that maintains a high DNA concentration at the interface of the surface/solution. Overall, our approach provides an accessible route to the study of genomic structural variation from samples containing no more than a handful of cells.