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. 2017 May 31;8:15639. doi: 10.1038/ncomms15639

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Copyright © 2017, The Author(s)

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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(a, left) The chemical structure of a HPS molecule. (right) A scheme of HPS aggregation thermodynamics and kinetics. Cooperativity (Q_n) is defined as the difference between the associated free energy of attaching a HPS monomer to the aggregate (ΔΔG_n) and the summarization of the two-body potential of mean force upon the attachment of the (n+1)^th monomer to the aggregate. (b) The principle of real-time monitoring of HPS aggregation in the microfluidic mixer. HPS (red dots) dissolved in DMSO (blue dots) is continuously pumped into the centre microchannel, and then squeezed by two side water (cyan dots) streams to form an extremely narrow stream with tenths of nanometres in width. Thus, rapid solvents exchange occurs in a pure diffusion manner, and HPS molecules aggregate in downstream with strong fluorescence emission under confocal optical microscopy. Blue arrows indicate the directions of continuous fluid flow. Black arrows indicate specific locations. (c,d) Thermodynamics (ΔΔG) (c), cooperativity (Q_n) (c) and kinetics (t) (d) of attaching a HPS monomer to aggregates in pure water.

Inline graphic — (a, left) The chemical structure of a HPS molecule. (right) A scheme of HPS aggregation thermodynamics and kinetics. Cooperativity (Q_n) is defined as the difference between the associated free energy of attaching a HPS monomer to the aggregate (ΔΔG_n) and the summarization of the two-body potential of mean force upon the attachment of the (n+1)^th monomer to the aggregate. (b) The principle of real-time monitoring of HPS aggregation in the microfluidic mixer. HPS (red dots) dissolved in DMSO (blue dots) is continuously pumped into the centre microchannel, and then squeezed by two side water (cyan dots) streams to form an extremely narrow stream with tenths of nanometres in width. Thus, rapid solvents exchange occurs in a pure diffusion manner, and HPS molecules aggregate in downstream with strong fluorescence emission under confocal optical microscopy. Blue arrows indicate the directions of continuous fluid flow. Black arrows indicate specific locations. (c,d) Thermodynamics (ΔΔG) (c), cooperativity (Q_n) (c) and kinetics (t) (d) of attaching a HPS monomer to aggregates in pure water.