I’m very honored to be featured on the cover of Nature’s August 8, 2019 issue!
The journal’s cover art describes the academic work by Tyler Ross, Matt Thomson, and their colleagues at Caltech in the paper “Controlling Organization and Forces in Active Matter Through Optically-Defined Boundaries.” Their work demonstrates that light can be used to guide the behavior of an engineered active-matter system—in this case kinesin motors that link together to organize microtubules (protein filaments that make up the cytoskeleton of animal cells) into star-shaped structures called asters. These controlled microtubule asters are also shown to create persistent fluid flows at very small scales and may contribute to new experimental methods in molecular biology and chemistry.
Caltech has featured a fantastic summary of the paper and why it’s so important, and they’ve made this great explainer video that shows the aster movements in action, take a look:
Credit: Caltech and Tyler Ross
Illustration Views:
Illustration detail (click to enlarge)
Illustration detail (click to enlarge)