BARCODE: high throughput screening and analysis of soft active materials

Published in Nature Communications, 2025

Link to publisher's version.

Excerpt of abstract: Active, responsive, non-equilibrium materials-at the forefront of materials engineering-offer dynamical restructuring, mobility and other complex life-like properties. Yet, this enhanced functionality comes with significant amplification of the size and complexity of the datasets needed to characterize their properties, thereby challenging conventional approaches to analysis. To meet this need, we present BARCODE: Biomaterial Activity Readouts to Categorize, Optimize, Design and Engineer, an open-access software that automates high throughput screening of microscopy video data to enable non-equilibrium material optimization and discovery. BARCODE produces a unique fingerprint or 'barcode' of performance metrics that visually and quantitatively encodes dynamic material properties with minimal file size.