Non-Spherical Soft Supraparticles from Microgel Building Blocks

Microgel particles can be fabricated with great control by droplet-based microfluidics; however, to this end, their shape is intrinsically limited to be spherical. Existing approaches to circumvent this limitation rely on the rapid interception of transient non-spherical preparticle shapes, greatly limiting their versatility. This paper presents a facile microfluidic approach that overcomes this limitation. The method utilizes the injection of scaffolding microgel particles into droplets that have insufficient volumes to host the microgels in a spherical shell. As a result, the drops adopt non-spherical equilibrium shapes that serve to template non-spherical soft supraparticles by slow and gentle chemical reactions.