During my PhD at the Microfluidics Laboratory (P. Tabeling, MMN, ESPCI Paris), I focused on the fabrication of disordered photonic materials. Bidisperse emulsions self-assemble on a chip to create hyperuniform structures with low density fluctuations¹. When the jamming point of these emulsions is crossed, the resulting hyperuniform foams exhibit photonic properties. They are the first disordered, self-assembled structures to possess a photonic bandgap².

Subsequently, I studied the fabrication of artificial cells on a chip in the form of DNA compartments fed with an expression system (Roy Bar-Ziv, Weizmann Institute). I reported the assembly of 2D arrays of 1,024 monolithic DNA compartments as artificial cells on a 5 mm² silicon chip. I then created a reaction-diffusion system using a 30×30 square lattice of interconnected artificial cells. The large-scale integration of these compartments on a chip demonstrates their ability to exhibit collective modes. This class of devices where 2D collective patterns of gene expression on a multicellular scale emerge, have applications in biological computing, sensing, and material synthesis³.

References

¹ Ricouvier, J., Pierrat, R., Carminati, R., Tabeling, P., & Yazhgur, P. (2017). Optimizing hyperuniformity in self-assembled bidisperse emulsions. Physical Review Letters.

² Ricouvier, J., Tabeling, P., & Yazhgur, P. (2019). Foam as a self-assembling amorphous photonic band gap material. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

³ Ricouvier, J., Mostov, P., Shabtai, O., Vonshak, O., Tayar, A., Karzbrun, E., ... & Bar-Ziv, R. (2024). Large-scale-integration and collective oscillations of 2D artificial cells. Nature Communications.