Microrheological Characterisation of Anisotropic Materials

Abstract

We describe the measurement of anisotropic viscoelastic moduli in complex soft materials, such as biopolymer gels, via video particle tracking microrheology of colloid tracer particles. The use of a correlation tensor to find the axes of maximum anisotropy, and hence the mechanical director, is described. The moduli of an aligned DNA gel are reported, as a test of the technique; this may have implications for high DNA concentrations in vivo. We also discuss the errors in microrheological measurement, and describe the use of frequency space filtering to improve displacement resolution, and hence probe these typically high modulus materials.

5 pages, 5 figures. Replaced after refereeing/ improvement. Main results are the same. The final, published version of the paper is here http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v73/e031901

References in corpus (4)

• Microscopic Viscoelasticity: Shear Moduli of Soft Materials Determined from Thermal Fluctuations
• Microrheology, stress fluctuations and active behavior of living cells
• One- and two-particle microrheology
• Friction Drag on a Particle Moving in a Nematic Liquid Crystal

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• Affine model of stress stiffening in semiflexible filament networks
• Comparative Analysis of Fluctuations in Viscoelastic Stress: A Comparison of the Temporary Network and Dumbbell models
• Hydrodynamics of a disk in a thin film of weakly nematic fluid subject to linear friction
• Dynamics of a simple model microswimmer in an anisotropic fluid: implications for alignment behavior and active transport in a nematic liquid crystal