Nature Communications (Sep 2019)

Enhanced ion tolerance of electrokinetic locomotion in polyelectrolyte-coated microswimmer

  • Xiaojun Zhan,
  • Jizhuang Wang,
  • Ze Xiong,
  • Xuan Zhang,
  • Ying Zhou,
  • Jing Zheng,
  • Jianan Chen,
  • Shien-Ping Feng,
  • Jinyao Tang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11907-1
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 1
pp. 1 – 9

Abstract

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Electrophoretic microswimmers aren’t well suited to function in vivo because electric-field screening reduces their speed in higher ionic-strength solutions. Here the authors propose a microswimmer that exploits high surface conductance to improve this ion tolerance to enable operation in a high salt environment.