Natural articular cartilage has ultralow friction even at high squeezing pressure. Biomimicking cartilage with soft materials has been and remains a grand challenge in the fields of materials science and engineering. Inspired by the unique structural features of the articular cartilage, as well as by its remarkable lubrication mechanisms dictated by the properties of the superficial layers, a novel archetype of cartilage-mimicking bilayer material by robustly entangling thick hydrophilic polyelectrolyte brushes into the subsurface of a stiff hydrogel substrate is developed. The topmost soft polymer layer provides effective aqueous lubrication, whereas the stiffer hydrogel layer used as a substrate delivers the load-bearing capacity. Their synergy is capable of attaining low friction coefficients (order 0.010) under heavily loaded conditions (order 10 MPa contact pressure) in water environment, a performance incredibly close to that of natural articular cartilage. The bioinspired material can maintain low friction even when subjected to 50k reciprocating cycles under high contact pressure, with almost no wear observed on the sliding track. These findings are theoretically explained and compounded by multiscale simulations used to shed light on the mechanisms responsible for this remarkable performance. This work opens innovative technology routes for developing cartilage-mimicking ultralow friction soft materials.

Drag reduction of up to 77.2% is achieved with air rings confined by alternating superhydrophobic and hydrophilic strips.

BackgroundAldehyde-deformylating oxygenase (ADO) is an important enzyme involved in the biosynthetic pathway of fatty alk(a/e)nes in cyanobacteria. However, ADO exhibits quite low chain-length specificity with respect to the substrates ranging from C4 to C18 aldehydes, which is not suitable for producing fuels with different properties or different chain lengths.ResultsBased on the crystal structures of cADOs (cyanobacterial ADO) with substrate analogs bound, some amino acids affecting the substrate specificity of cADO were identified, including the amino acids close to the aldehyde group and the hydrophobic tail of the substrate and those along the substrate channel. Using site-directed mutagenesis, selected amino acids were replaced with bulky ones introducing steric hindrance to the binding pocket via large functional groups. All mutants were overexpressed, purified and kinetically characterized. All mutants, except F87Y, displayed dramatically reduced activity towards C14,16,18 aldehydes. Notably, the substrate preferences of some mutants towards different chain-length substrates were enhanced: I24Y for n-heptanal, I27F for n-decanal and n-dodecanal, V28F for n-dodecanal, F87Y for n-decanal, C70F for n-hexanal, A118F for n-butanal, A121F for C4,6,7 aldehydes, V184F for n-dodecanal and n-decanal, M193Y for C6–10 aldehydes and L198F for C7–10 aldehydes. The impact of the engineered cADO mutants on the change of the hydrocarbon profile was demonstrated by co-expressing acyl-ACP thioesterase BTE, fadD and V184F in E. coli, showing that n-undecane was the main fatty alkane.ConclusionsSome amino acids, which can control the chain-length selectivity of substrates of cADO, were identified. The substrate specificities of cADO were successfully changed through structure-guided protein engineering, and some mutants displayed different chain-length preference. The in vivo experiments of V184F in genetically engineered E. coli proved the importance of engineered cADOs on the distribution of the fatty alkane profile. The results would be helpful for the production of fatty alk(a/e)nes in cyanobacteria with different properties.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13068-016-0596-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The slip behavior of simple fluids over atomically smooth surfaces was investigated in a wide range of wall-fluid interaction (WFI) energies at low shear rates using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. The relationship between slip and WFI shows two regimes (the strong-WFI and weak-WFI regimes): as WFI decreases, the slip length increases in the strong-WFI regime and decreases in the weak-WFI regime. The critical value of WFI energy that separates these regimes increases with temperature, but it remains unaffected by the driving force. The mechanism of slip was analyzed by examining the density-weighted average energy barrier (ΔE¯) encountered by fluid atoms in the first fluid layer (FFL) during their hopping between minima of the surface potential. We demonstrated that the relationship between slip and WFI can be rationalized by considering the effect of the fluid density distribution in the FFL on ΔE¯ as a function of the WFI energy. Moreover, the dependence of the slip length on WFI and temperature is well correlated with the exponential factor exp(-ΔE¯/(kT)), which also determines the critical value of WFI between the strong-WFI and weak-WFI regimes.

The systematicness, flexibility, and complexity of natural biological organisms are a constant stream of inspiration for researchers. Therefore, mimicking the natural intelligence system to develop microrobotics has attracted broad interests. However, developing a multifunctional device for various application scenarios has great challenges. Herein, we present a bionic multifunctional actuation devicea light-driven mudskipper-like actuator that is composed of a porous silicone elastomer and graphene oxide. The actuator exhibits a reversible and wellintegrated response to near-infrared (NIR) light due to the photothermal-induced contractile stress in the actuation film, which promotes generation of cyclical and rapid locomotion upon NIR light being switched on and off, such as bending in air and crawling in liquid. Furthermore, through rational device design and modulation of light, the mechanically versatile device can float and swim controllably following a predesigned route at the liquid/air interface. More interestingly, the actuator can jump from liquid medium to air with an extremely short response time (400 ms), a maximum speed of 2 m s −1 , and a height of 14.3 cm under the stimulation of near-infrared light. The present work possesses great potential in the applications of bioinspired actuators in various fields, such as microrobots, sensors, and locomotion.

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As pure lubricants, ILs performed very well by forming the classical self-assembly bilayer at the sliding interface. The interface mechanism is still not clear in a very polar, e.g., water-based lubricating system. In this work, the interfacial absorption and tribological behavior of carboxylic alkanolamine ionic liquids (CAILs) serving as aqueous lubricating additives were studied by applying positive and negative potentials on the friction pair, accompanied by the comprehensive discussion of data from critical micelle concentration, quartz crystal microbalance, ECR, and MD results. The results reveal that the adsorption behavior, unexpectedly, was affected by the high polarity of H 2 O, where a less dense double-layer structure is observed at the interface by model imitation. Conversely, the monomolecular adsorption layer constructed electrostatically between the polar head (−COO − ) and the positive base dominates the tribofilm. Meanwhile, the cations are partially accumulating around anions in the presence of static electricity, which does not form a neat and dense one-to-one corresponding cation−anion pair. In the solution, the IL maintains a state of dissociation and minor agglomeration. Furthermore, an increase in alkyl chains contributes to the thickness of the protective film generated by CAILs on the sliding asperity. Eventually, the synergistic effect from physical adsorption and the tribochemical reaction is responsible for excellent lubricity and antiwear performance of CAILs.

Molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the rate and temperature dependence of the slip length in thin liquid films confined by smooth, thermal substrates. In our setup, the heat generated in a force-driven flow is removed by the thermostat applied on several wall layers away from liquid-solid interfaces. We found that for both high and low wall-fluid interaction (WFI) energies, the temperature of the fluid phase rises significantly as the shear rate increases. Surprisingly, with increasing shear rate, the slip length approaches a constant value from above for high WFI energies and from below for low WFI energies. The two distinct trends of the rate-dependent slip length are rationalized by examining S(G_{1}), the height of the main peak of the in-plane structure factor of the first fluid layer (FFL) together with D_{WF}, which is the average distance between the wall and FFL. The results of numerical simulations demonstrate that reduced values of the structure factor, S(G_{1}), correlate with the enhanced slip, while smaller distances D_{WF} indicate that fluid atoms penetrate deeper into the surface potential leading to larger friction and smaller slip. Interestingly, at the lowest WFI energy, the combined effect of the increase of S(G_{1}) and decrease of D_{WF} with increasing shear rate results in a dramatic reduction of the slip length.