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Active motility and wetting cooperatively regulate liquid-liquid phase separation

Dixi Yang,Anheng Wang,Chunming Wang,Hajime Tanaka,Jiaxing Yuan

Published 2025 in Unknown venue

ABSTRACT

Liquid-liquid phase separation of aqueous two-phase system (ATPS) is fundamental across physical and biological sciences. While well understood for passive systems, how this process is regulated by active agents such as motile bacteria remains largely unexplored. By combining experiments on Pseudomonas aeruginosa in a prototypical dextran-polyethylene glycol ATPS with hydrodynamic simulations, we show that the interplay between bacterial activity and interfacial wetting gives rise to a robust sequence of nonequilibrium morphologies, including self-spinning droplets, elongated droplet chains, branched capillary-like clusters, and highly deformed droplets. We find that activity plays a dual role in coarsening kinetics: it suppresses coarsening through hydrodynamically driven, activity-induced droplet rotation, yet accelerates it when dextran is the minority phase, where wetting-mediated attraction governs bacterial aggregation. These findings reveal a generic physical mechanism through which motility and wetting cooperatively control phase-separation dynamics, offering new physical insight into activity-regulated LLPS and suggesting strategies for engineering ATPS morphology using active agents.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2025

  • Venue

    Unknown venue

  • Publication date

    2025-11-22

  • Fields of study

    Physics, Chemistry

  • Identifiers
    arXiv 2511.18077
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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