Biomimetic enzyme cascade reaction systems in microcapsules are developed for mimicking biocatalysis of organelles.
Biologically inspired self-healing structural color hydrogels were developed by adding a glucose oxidase (GOX)- and catalase (CAT)-filled glutaraldehyde cross-linked BSA hydrogel into methacrylated gelatin (GelMA) inverse opal scaffolds. The composite hydrogel materials with the polymerized GelMA scaffold could maintain the stability of an inverse opal structure and its resultant structural colors, whereas the protein hydrogel filler could impart self-healing capability through the reversible covalent attachment of glutaraldehyde to lysine residues of BSA and enzyme additives. A series of unprecedented structural color materials could be created by assembling and healing the elements of the composite hydrogel. In addition, as both the GelMA and the protein hydrogels were derived from organisms, the composite materials presented high biocompatibility and plasticity. These features of self-healing structural color hydrogels make them excellent functional materials for different applications.
Morpho butterflies are famous for their wings' brilliant structural colors arising from periodic nanostructures, which show great potential value for fundamental research and practical applications. Here, a novel cellular mechanical visualizable biosensor formed by assembling engineered cardiac tissues on the Morpho butterfly wings is presented. The assembled cardiomyocytes benefit from the periodic parallel nanoridges of the wings and can recover their autonomic beating ability with guided cellular orientation and good contraction performance. As the beating processes are accompanied by the cardiomyocytes' elongation and contraction, the elastic butterfly wing substrate undergoes the same cycle of deformations, which causes corresponding synchronous shifts in their structural colors and photonic bandgaps for self‐reporting of the cell mechanics. It is demonstrated that this self‐reporting performance can be further improved by adding oriented carbon nanotubes in the nanoridges of the wings for the culture. In addition, taking advantage of the similar size of the cardiomyocyte and a single Morpho wing scale, the investigation of single‐cell‐level mechanics can be realized by detecting the optical performance of a single scale. These remarkable properties make these butterfly wings ideal platforms for biomedical research.
As an important characteristic of many creatures, structural colors play a crucial role in the survival of organisms. Inspired by these features, an intelligent structural color material with a heterogeneous striped pattern and stimuli-responsivity by fast self-assembly of colloidal nanoparticles in capillaries with a certain diameter range are presented here. The width, spacing, color, and even combination of the structural color stripe patterns can be precisely tailored by adjusting the self-assembly parameters. Attractively, with the integration of a near-infrared (NIR) light responsive graphene hydrogel into the structural color stripe pattern, the materials are endowed with light-controlled reversible bending behavior with self-reporting color indication. It is demonstrated that the striped structural color materials can be used as NIR-light-triggered dynamic barcode labels for the anti-counterfeiting of different products. These features of the bioinspired structural color stripe pattern materials indicate their potential values for mimicking structural color organisms, which will find important applications in constructing intelligent sensors, anti-counterfeiting devices, and so on.
Considerable efforts have been devoted to developing artificial micro/nanomotors that can convert energy into movement. A flow lithography integrated microfluidic spinning and spiraling system is developed for the continuous generation of bioinspired helical micromotors. Because the generation processes could be precisely tuned by adjusting the flow rates and the illuminating frequency, the length, diameter, and pitch of the helical micromotors were highly controllable. Benefiting from the fast online gelation and polymerization, the resultant helical micromotors could be imparted with Janus, triplex, and core-shell cross-sectional structures that have never been achieved by other methods. Owing to the spatially controlled encapsulation of functional nanoparticles in the microstructures, the helical micromotors can perform locomotion not only by magnetically actuated rotation or corkscrew motion but also through chemically powered catalytic reaction.
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