Paulina Skrzeszewska (Wageningen)
Collagen-inspired self aggregating materials

Duc Nguyen (UvA Amsterdam)
Critical Casimir Effect provides direct Control of Colloidal Interactions
The Casimir Effect is a celebrated phenomenon in quantum physics. It manifests itself as the effective attraction between two dielectrics brought close to each other to confine fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. A similar force arises between two surfaces in a liquid mixture close to its critical point: Confinement of critical fluctuations of the liquid results in an attractive force between the walls, when the wall separation is of the order of the correlation length of the liquid. We use this effect for a fine control of colloidal interactions. The temperature dependence of the correlation length allows us to `freeze' a colloidal gas into a colloidal liquid, and a liquid into a solid. This offers novel opportunities for the assembly of micro- and nanomaterials. I will present recently developed optically transparent systems that allow use of conventional light scattering and confocal microscopy to study Critical Casimir-mediated particle assembly.

Marc Lemmers (Wageningen)
Multi-responsive reversible gels based on charge-driven assembly
In my soundbite I will show that it is possible to produce a new class of multi-responsive reversible gels based on charge-driven co-assembly of two water soluble components; an ABA triblock copolymer with hydrophilic middle-block and polyelectrolyte end-blocks, and an oppositely charged homopolymer.
I will show that these reversible gels are truly multi-responsive. The viscosity of these gels increases strongly as function of the total polymer concentration: six orders of magnitude with a four-fold increase in concentration. Contrary to this, the viscosity can be drastically decreased again by the addition of a little salt. Besides concentration and ionic strength, the gel properties can also be drastically altered by changing temperature, charge composition or pH.

Peter Prinsen (Leiden)
Multi-shell structures of virus coat proteins
Under conditions of low ionic strength and a pH ranging between about 3.7 and 5.0, solutions of purified coat proteins of cowpea chlorotic mottle virus (CCMV) form spherical multi-shell structures in the absence of viral RNA. The outer surfaces of the shells in these structures are negatively charged whereas the inner surfaces are positively charged due to a disordered cationic N-terminal domain of the capsid protein, the arginine-rich RNA-binding motif that protrudes into the interior.  We argue that the main forces stabilizing these multi-shells are counterion release combined with a lower charge density in the RNA-binding motif region of the outer shells due to their larger radii of curvature, which compensate for the outer shells not being able to adopt the smaller, optimal, radius of curvature of the inner shell. This explains why the structures are only stable at low ionic strengths at pHs for which the outer surface is negatively charged and why the larger outer shells are not observed separately in solution. The spacing between shells is determined mainly by the entropic elasticity of the RNA-binding motifs.

Burak Eral (Twente)
Asymetric diffusion in micron size closed cylinders
In this work, we study dynamics/diffusion of colloidal particles (PT) confined in 3D micron scale cylinders embedded in a multilayer microfluidic device measured by Particle tracking. We show that in the vicinity of the walls total diffusion is hindered furthermore this decrease is asymmetric for diffusion coefficient in radial direction (D?) i.e. perpendicular to wall and tangential direction (D?) parallel to wall. Behavior observed in cylindrical cavity is significantly different from a single particle in the vicinity of flat solid wall.

Joost de Graaf (Utrecht)
Towards Adsorption Dynamics of Colloids at the Liquid-Liquid Interface
Using a new numerical technique [J. de Graaf et al., Phys. Rev. E 80, 051405 (2009)], we determine the adsorption free-energy landscape of anisotropic colloids at a flat liquid-liquid interface. The free energy is based on surface and line tension contributions, building upon Pieranski's original adsorption model. We apply simplified Langevin dynamics to the free-energy landscape to study the colloidal adsorption process. Our results show that the adsorption mechanism for anisotropic particles can be extremely complex, and give confidence in our technique as an initial step towards accurately modeling experimental systems.

Kiri Nichol (Leiden)
Melting a granular solid with oscillatory shear
In the absence of mechanical excitations a container of glass beads behaves as a solid. However, agitating the grains with a disk spinning in the bottom of the container causes the particles to behave collectively as a liquid. Liquid-like behaviour is also apparent when the disk oscillates at large amplitudes, but at smaller oscillation amplitudes the system is more solid-like: heavy objects sink irregularly while low-density objects remain stuck.

Niels Boon (Utrecht)
Charge regulation, ionic screening, and effective interaction of patchy surfaces
The properties of flat surfaces with chargeable patches were studied using non-linear Poisson-Boltzmann theory in combination with charge regulation. We calculated the force between surfaces and observed that a repulsive force at large separations can become attractive at smaller separations, due to charge regulation at the patches. The size of the potential barrier between attraction and repulsion can be tuned by varying the patch size.

Marieke Schor (UvA Amsterdam)
Silk: stacking, sliding or templating?
Silk-based proteins have been used succesfully  as building blocks for self-assembling nanomaterials. However, the mechanisms by which the silk-based proteins assemble to form fibrils remains unclear. Here we compare three hypothetical mechanisms for assembly of two proteins via molecular dynamics simulations.

Daniel Florea (Eindhoven)
Colloidal particles as a model for supramolecular polymers
In the last 20 years the design of polymers changed from classical macromolecules to a class of reversible supramolecular polymers. Supramolecular polymers are assembled using non-covalent interactions and this feature assures adjustable properties that can react to external stimuli.  The remarkable properties of these materials are already applied in the following fields: adhesives, printing, cosmetics and coatings. We study a colloidal model that mimics the behavior of a supramolecular polymer. The advantage of our approach is given by the longer length scale which makes these systems easier to study.

José Alvarado (Amolf)
Confined Active Networks
Just as skyscrapers depend on materials like steel and concrete to resist external forces, cells depend on proteins like actin to define their mechanical properties. But unlike buildings, cells have motor proteins like myosin which allow them to move, exert forces, and stiffen. Existing studies show that actin-myosin networks exhibit a rich phase space in-vitro. But equilibrium actin filaments have been shown to organize spontaneously when confined to cellular dimensions. How does this spontaneous organization affect active networks? To answer this question, we encapsulate actin-myosin networks in cell-sized cavities. We aim to quantify their spatial organization with microscopy while measuring their mechanical properties with microrheology. Preliminary results suggest confinement induces a greater degree of bundling and richer behavior compared to the unconfined case.

Ethayaraja Mani (Utrecht)
Self-assembly of patchy particles: Implications for protein crystallization

Ronald Otten (Eindhoven)
Tactoids of plate-like particles in a magnetic field
We investigate how a magnetic field deforms nematic droplets, or tactoids, that spontaneously form in suspensions of colloidal gibbsite platelets, for the cases of sterically stabilised gibbsite in an apolar solvent and charged gibbsite in a polar solvent (water). Our findings provide the first experimental evidence for the existence of a so-called split-core defect structure that was predicted 10 years ago. To rationalise our observations, we also calculated state diagrams of the shape and director-field structure as a function of tactoid size, magnetic field strength, and material parameters, which (qualitatively) reproduce the observed director-field and shape transformations.

Triet Dang (UvA Amsterdam)
Colloidal crystal-liquid Interface: Free energy and Surface tension
Investigation of the crystal--liquid interface is of central importance for understanding crystal growth, and nucleation. This interface is the most difficult to study experimentally because it is buried between two condensed phases. We use micron-size colloidal particles as models to visualize atomic processes of crystal growth. We determine all thermodynamic properties of the system: pressure, chemical potential, and free energy density. We use interface fluctuations to determine the interfacial tension. Remarkably, the interfacial tension value that we find shows a very good agreement with that determined in simulations.

Liesbeth Huisman (Leiden)
Fast deformation of biopolymer networks
We develop a new method to model the viscoelastic response of biopolymer networks on oscillatory shear. We observe an intermediate regime of frequency dependent strain stiffening. At these intermediate frequencies, the single-filament modes have enough time to fully relaxed but the network as whole has not.

Wouter den Otter (Twente)
Self-assembly of clathrin into polyhedral cages
Clathrins are protein complexes with three long legs wich enable them to self-assemble into closed polyhedral cages. These intricate cages contain pentagonal and hexagonal faces, with one triskelion hub residing at every vertex and four legs running along every edge. Cage formation, and the concommittant bending of a membrane into a cargo-loaden vesicle play an important role in endocytosis, the uptake of large molecules by living cells. We briefly present some simulation results on the self-assembly of clathrin cages.

Igor Saulo Santos de Oliveira (Twente)
Simulating viscoelastic fluids and embedded particles
We are investigating the structure formation of colloids in sheared viscoelastic solvents using Brownian dynamics
simulations. We started by simulating the viscoelastic solvent, represented by a shear-thinning elastic polymer solution. While Newtonian liquids react to shear deformations by developing stresses proportional to the applied shear rates, complex fluids display a variety of more complex stress versus rate of strain relationships. In many cases, the apparent viscosity, i.e. the ratio of stress and rate of strain decreases with an increase in shear rate, this phenomenon is called shear thinning. During the simulations of the polymer solution, entanglements between chains appear and disappear continuously. This effect is included in the Brownian dynamics by a recent method dubbed Responsive Particle Dynamics (RaPiD), in which the overlap of two different polymers are described by the number of entanglements between both polymers. The results obtained from the simulations agree with experimental shear-thinning curves. From this point forward, we want to include different particles to the system, starting with spherical ones, in order to observe and analyze the structure formation of these particles in the viscoelastic fluid.