In the microscopic structures created in nanofluidics, biological molecules and particles can move in unexpected or useful ways. For example, a long and tangled DNA molecule can be forced to straighten itself out in order to emerge.

One of the main directions of our research involves imaging DNA in nanochannels, a method that can quickly provide coarse-scale information on the information content and length of DNA molecules from both bacteria and humans. Other projects include how confinement and molecular crowding affect polymers and marker particles. Collaborations with groups performing the experiments are complemented by methods from statistical physics, computational physics, image analysis and statistics.