While that’s microscopic, it’s still too big for medical purposes. The Voyager was 15 micrometres (0.015 millimetres). The team at Leiden University had to make ones that were big enough to visualise and observe with optical microscopes. One the hurdles researchers currently face in using microswimmers in drug treatment is their size.
‘They could also potentially be used for cargo delivery, environmental remediation, lab-on-a chip, and other micromachine applications,’ Doherty said. The study is just one of the initial steps towards the development of self-propelled microswimmers that could one day be used by doctors to deliver life-saving drugs to specific parts of the body. We’re also investigating more conventional and practical shapes, such as helixes, ellipsoids, and trimers.’ ‘The boat and Voyager were used to test the limits of our 3D printer and to show its capability to create complex structures and also because it’s fun. ‘We have looked at several designs so far,’ said co-author Rachel Doherty. The researchers also used a few other designs including a boat that has since been declared the smallest one in the world. The more streamlined Voyager, helmed by Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek’s first female captain, proved more practical. Dr Ouhajji and her colleagues were worried that they couldn’t handle the amount of platinum required to make them ‘swim’.
The problem with the more iconic Starship Enterprise and its various incarnations is that their structures weren’t suitable to be used in microswimmers. However, in the end, we chose Voyager as a matter of convenience.’ If I remember correctly, that was the first ship my former student Jonas suggested. ‘We did consider printing the Enterprise. ‘A lot of scientists are Star Trek fans, myself not included,’ said Samia Ouhajji, one of the study’s authors. One of them was the USS Voyager, the intrepid-class starship featured on Star Trek: Voyager. When Dr Kraft’s team came to decide which designs to use, various ideas were considered. Microswimmers are incredibly small objects that are capable of moving through liquid on their own by interacting with their surroundings and through various chemical reactions. The somewhat out-of-this-world project was part of a study led by Daniela Kraft to observe how shape impacts the motion and interactions of ‘microswimmers’, the results of which were recently published in the scientific journal Soft Matter.
Photo: Rachel Doherty and Samia Ouhajji, Leiden UniversityĪ group of researchers at Leiden University have been determined to boldly go where no researchers had quite gone before by using a cutting-edge 3D printer to make an incredibly tiny Star Trek ship.
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