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We present a simple method to produce giant lipid pseudo-vesicles (vesicles with an oily cap on the top), trapped in an agarose gel. The method can be implemented using only a regular micropipette and relies on the formation of a water/oil/water double droplet in liquid agarose. We characterize the produced vesicle with fluorescence imaging and establish the presence and integrity of the lipid bilayer by the successful insertion of {\alpha}-Hemolysin transmembrane proteins. Finally, we show that the vesicle can be easily mechanically deformed, non-intrusively, by indenting the surface of the gel.

Tissues are subjected to large external forces and undergo global deformations during morphogenesis. We use synthetic analogues of tissues to study the impact of cell-cell adhesion on the response of cohesive cellular assemblies under such stresses. In particular, we use biomimetic emulsions in which the droplets are functionalized in order to exhibit specific droplet-droplet adhesion. We flow these emulsions in microfluidic constrictions and study their response to this forced deformation via confocal microscopy. We find that the distributions of avalanche sizes are conserved between repulsive and adhesive droplets. However, adhesion locally impairs the rupture of droplet-droplet contacts, which in turn pulls on the rearranging droplets. As a result, adhesive droplets are a lot more deformed along the axis of elongation in the constriction. This finding could shed light on the origin of polarization processes during morphogenesis., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

We study the elasto-plastic behavior of dense attractive emulsions under mechanical perturbation. The attraction is introduced through non-specific depletion interactions between the droplets and is controlled by changing the concentration of surfactant micelles in the continuous phase. We find that such attractive forces are not sufficient to induce any measurable modification on the scalings between the local packing fraction and the deformation of the droplets. However, when the emulsions are flown through 2D microfluidic constrictions, we uncover a measurable effect of attraction on their elasto-plastic response. Indeed, we measure higher levels of deformation inside the constriction for attractive droplets. In addition, we show that these measurements correlate with droplet rearrangements that are spatially delayed in the constriction for higher attraction forces., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

We present a large range of experimental data concerning the influence of surfactants on the well-known Landau-Levich-Derjaguin experiment where a liquid film is generated by pulling a solid plate out of a bath. The thickness h of the film was measured as a function of the pulling velocity V for different kind of surfactant and at various concentrations. Measuring the thickening factor $\alpha=h/h_{LLD}$, where hLLD is obtained for a pure liquid, in a wide range of capillary ($Ca=\eta V/\gamma$), two regimes of constant thickening can be identified: at small capillary number, $\alpha$ is large due to a confinement and surface elasticity (or Marangoni) effects and at large Ca, $\alpha$ is slightly higher than unity, due to surface viscous effects. At intermediate Ca, $\alpha$ decreases as Ca increases along a "dynamic transition". In the case of non-ionic surfactants, the dynamic transition occurs at a fixed Ca, independently of the surfactant concentration, while for ionic surfactants, the dynamic transition depends on the concentration due to the existence of an electrostatic barrier. The control of physico-chemical parameters allowed us to elucidate the nature of the dynamic transition and to relate it to surface rheology., Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, submitted paper