Micromechanics of soft materials using microfluidics

Abstract Micron-scale soft materials are finding a wide range of applications in bioengineering and molecular medicine, while also increasingly emerging as useful components for consumer products. The mechanical characterization such microscale objects is conventionally performed with techniques atomic force microscopy or micropipette aspiration that measure the local properties micron scale serial manner. To permit scalable global objects, we developed describe here microfluidic platform can be used performing parallelized integrated measurements shear modulus individual particles. We demonstrate effectiveness this approach by characterizing multiple protein microgels parallel, show obtained values good agreement conventional measurements. This allows situ deformable micron-scale particles, builds on single-layer soft-photolithography fabrication, making measurement system readily adaptable potential applications. Graphical