This paper presents an innovative driving method for an on-chip robot actuated by permanent magnets in a microfluidic chip. A piezoelectric ceramic is applied to induce ultrasonic vibration to the microfluidic chip and the high-frequency vibration reduces the effective friction on the MMT significantly. As a result, we achieved 1.1 micrometre positioning accuracy of the microrobot, which is 100 times higher accuracy than without vibration. The response speed is also improved and the microrobot can be actuated with a speed of 5.5 mm s(-1) in 3 degrees of freedom. The novelty of the ultrasonic vibration appears in the output force as well. Contrary to the reduction of friction on the microrobot, the output force increased twice as much by the ultrasonic vibration. Using this high accuracy, high speed, and high power microrobot, swine oocyte manipulations are presented in a microfluidic chip.

This paper presents an innovative driving method for a magnetically driven microtool to achieve precise positioning control while maintaining a high power output derived from commercialized permanent magnets. An effective driving methodology using permanent magnets, whose axes are parallel to driving direction, is applied to reduce friction force on the microtool. The positioning accuracy improves by five times and the response speed becomes ten times faster against the driving stage than in the conventional method. Furthermore, this method has been extended to two-degree-of-freedom movements, and the performance of the magnetically driven microtools is experimentally validated by oocyte manipulation.

Species richness in local communities has been considered an important factor determining the success of invasion by exotic species (the biotic resistance hypothesis). However, the detailed mechanisms, especially the role of predator communities, are not well understood. We studied biotic resistance to an invasive freshwater snail, Pomacea canaliculata, at 31 sites in an urban river basin (the Yamatogawa) in western Japan. First, we studied the relationship between the richness of local animal species and the abundance of P. canaliculata, demonstrating a negative relationship, which suggests that the intensity of biotic resistance regulates local snail populations. This pattern was due to the richness of native predator communities rather than that of introduced species or non-predators (mainly competitors of the apple snail). Local snail abundance was also affected by immigration of snails from nearby rice fields (i.e. propagule pressure), where few predators occur. Second, we assessed short-term predation pressure on the snail by means of a tethering experiment. Predation pressure was positively correlated with the number of individual predators and negatively correlated with snail abundance. The introduced crayfish Procambarus clarkii was responsible for the variance in predation pressure. These results indicate that the predator community, composed of both native and introduced species, is responsible for resistance to a novel invader even in a polluted urban river.

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Bacterial suspensions show turbulence-like spatiotemporal dynamics and vortices moving irregularly inside the suspensions. Understanding these ordered vortices is an ongoing challenge in active matter physics, and their application to the control of autonomous material transport will provide significant development in microfluidics. Despite the extensive studies, one of the key aspects of bacterial propulsion has remained elusive: The motion of bacteria is chiral, i.e., it breaks mirror symmetry. Therefore, the mechanism of control of macroscopic active turbulence by microscopic chirality is still poorly understood. Here, we report the selective stabilization of chiral rotational direction of bacterial vortices in achiral circular microwells sealed by an oil/water interface. The intrinsic chirality of bacterial swimming near the top and bottom interfaces generates chiral collective motions of bacteria at the lateral boundary of the microwell that are opposite in directions. These edge currents grow stronger as bacterial density increases, and, within different top and bottom interfaces, their competition leads to a global rotation of the bacterial suspension in a favored direction, breaking the mirror symmetry of the system. We further demonstrate that chiral edge current favors corotational configurations of interacting vortices, enhancing their ordering. The intrinsic chirality of bacteria is a key feature of the pairing order transition from active turbulence, and the geometric rule of pairing order transition may shed light on the strategy for designing chiral active matter.