Biohybrid active matter -- the emergent properties of cell-mediated microtransport

Abstract

As society paves its way towards device miniaturization and precision medicine, micro-scale actuation and guided transport become increasingly prominent research fields with high impact in both technological and clinical contexts. In order to accomplish directed motion of micron-sized objects towards specific target sites, active biohybrid transport systems, such as motile living cells that act as smart biochemically-powered micro-carriers, have been suggested as an alternative to synthetic micro-robots. Inspired by the motility of leukocytes, we propose the amoeboid crawling of eukaryotic cells as a promising mechanism for transport of micron-sized cargoes and present an in-depth study of this novel type of composite active matter. Its transport properties result from the interactions of an active element (cell) and a passive one (cargo) and reveal an optimal cargo size that enhances the locomotion of the load-carrying cells, even exceeding their motility in the absence of cargo. The experimental findings are rationalized in terms of a biohybrid active matter theory that explains the emergent cell-cargo dynamics and enables us to derive the long-time transport properties of amoeboid micro-carries. As amoeboid locomotion is commonly observed for mammalian cells such as leukocytes, our results lay the foundations for the study of transport performance of other medically relevant cell types and for extending our findings to more advanced transport tasks in complex environments, such as tissues.