Enhanced diffusion of colloidal tracers due to enzymatic activity

Abstract

Enzymatic catalysis can generate nonequilibrium fluctuations, but how these couple to tracer motion at larger length scales depends on physical context. Here, we investigate colloidal tracers in two configurations: passive particles dispersed in an enzymatically active solution, and enzyme-decorated particles where catalysis occurs directly at the tracer surface. We combine differential dynamic microscopy (DDM), which probes ensemble-averaged long-time diffusion, with optical tweezer (OT) measurements of short-time force fluctuations, and compare several complementary metrics for quantifying activity-induced enhancement. For 1 $μ$m tracers, we observe activity-induced enhancements in both configurations, with the strongest effects for enzyme-decorated particles, which exhibit enhanced diffusion and increased non-thermal force fluctuations. For 200 nm tracers, enhancements are more subtle and method-dependent: DDM detects modest increases in diffusion for bare particles, while corresponding signatures are not resolved by the OT. These results demonstrate that enzymatic activity can be transduced from molecular to microscale motion and forces, but that the apparent magnitude and detectability of enhancement depend strongly on tracer size, localization of activity, the timescales probed by the measurement, and the metric used to quantify enhancement. More broadly, understanding how enzyme activity modifies transport and fluctuations across scales is important for interpreting nonequilibrium dynamics in active soft matter, intracellular transport, and chemically crowded biological environments.