Browsing by Author "Jager, Edwin W. H."

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    Artificial muscles powered by glucose
    (Wiley, 2019-06-19) Mashayekhi Mazar, Fariba; Martinez, Jose G.; Tyagi, Manav; Alijanianzadeh, Mahdi; Turner, Anthony P. F.; Jager, Edwin W. H.
    Untethered actuation is important for robotic devices to achieve autonomous motion, which is typically enabled by using batteries. Using enzymes to provide the required electrical charge is particularly interesting as it will enable direct harvesting of fuel components from a surrounding fluid. Here, a soft artificial muscle is presented, which uses the biofuel glucose in the presence of oxygen. Glucose oxidase and laccase enzymes integrated in the actuator catalytically convert glucose and oxygen into electrical power that in turn is converted into movement by the electroactive polymer polypyrrole causing the actuator to bend. The integrated bioelectrode pair shows a maximum open‐circuit voltage of 0.70 ± 0.04 V at room temperature and a maximum power density of 0.27 µW cm−2 at 0.50 V, sufficient to drive an external polypyrrole‐based trilayer artificial muscle. Next, the enzymes are fully integrated into the artificial muscle, resulting in an autonomously powered actuator that can bend reversibly in both directions driven by glucose and O2 only. This autonomously powered artificial muscle can be of great interest for soft (micro‐)robotics and implantable or ingestible medical devices manoeuvring throughout the body, for devices in regenerative medicine, wearables, and environmental monitoring devices operating autonomously in aqueous environments
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    Tunable conjugated polymers for bacterial differentiation
    (Elsevier, 2015-09-08) Golabi, Mohsen; Turner, Anthony P. F.; Jager, Edwin W. H.
    A novel rapid method for bacterial differentiation is explored based on the specific adhesion pattern of bacterial strains to tunable polymer surfaces. Different types of counter ions were used to electrochemically fabricate dissimilar polypyrrole (PPy) films with diverse physicochemical properties such as hydrophobicity, thickness and roughness. These were then modulated into three different oxidation states in each case. The dissimilar sets of conducting polymers were exposed to five different bacterial strains, Deinococcus proteolyticus, Serratia marcescens, Pseudomonas fluorescens, Alcaligenes faecalis and Staphylococcus epidermidis. By analysis of the fluorescent microscope images, the number of bacterial cells adhered to each surface were evaluated. Generally, the number of cells of a particular bacterial strain that adhered varied when exposed to dissimilar polymer surfaces, due to the effects of the surface properties of the polymer on bacterial attachment. Similarly, the number of cells that adhered varied with different bacterial strains exposed to the same surface, reflecting the different surface properties of the bacteria. Principal component analysis showed that each strain of bacteria had its own specific adhesion pattern. Hence, they could be discriminated by this simple, label-free method based on tunable polymer arrays combined with pattern recognition.