Muscle-Mimetic Synergistic Covalent and Supramolecular Polymers: Phototriggered Formation Leads to Mechanical Performance Boost

Abstract

A thin filament stimulated by Ca2+ to combine with myosin is the structural basis to achieve filament sliding and muscle contraction. Though a large variety of artificial materials has been developed by mimicking muscle, the on-demand combination of the actin filament and myosin has never been precisely reproduced in polymeric systems. Herein, we show that both the combination process and the combined structure of actin filament and myosin have been mimicked to construct synergistic covalent and supramolecular polymers (CSPs). Specifically, photoirradiation as a stimulus induces the independently formed covalent polymers (CPs) and supramolecular polymers (SPs) to interact with each other through activated quadruple H-bonding. The resultant CSPs possess a unique network structure which not only facilitates the synergistic effect of CPs and SPs to afford stiff, strong, yet tough materials but also provides efficient pathways to dissipate energy with the damping capacity of the representative material being higher than 95%. Furthermore, muscle functions, for example, by becoming stiff during contraction and self-growth by training, are imitated well in our system via in situ phototriggered formation of CSP in the solid state. We hope that the fundamental understanding gained from this work will promote the development of synergistic CSP systems with emergent functions and applications by mimicking the principle of muscle movements.

Supertough spontaneously self-healing polymer based on septuple dynamic bonds integrated in one chemical group

“…The area of the hysteresis loop corresponded to the energy dissipated during the cyclic tensile tests. Damping capacity, defined as the ratio of the dissipated energy and the loading energy [55,56]. With the strain of cyclic tensile tests increased from 100% to 1500%, the damping capacities of Fe-PPOU were increased from 63.2% to 81.2% with energy dissipations increased from 0.8 to 58.8 MJ m −3 (Figure 3e), which was the highest reported value for room-temperature spontaneously self-healing polymers [1,22,[24][25][26]28,30,31,35,[37][38][39][40][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49].…”

Codes in Code: AIE Supramolecular Adhesive Hydrogels Store Huge Amounts of Information

“…[ 57,58 ] Tensile experiments (Figure S6 and Movie S1, Supporting Information) shown that the fracture strain values of hydrogels G1 , G2 , and G3 were severally 135%, 170%, and 151%, and thus have certain mechanical strength. [ 59,60 ] In addition, it can be seen from the fluorescence spectra (Figure S7, Supporting Information) that the emission wavelengths of the three hydrogels G1 , G2 , and G3 were 653, 565, and 439 nm, indicating that they respectively displayed red, yellow, and blue fluorescence. [ 3,61 ] These data demonstrated the successful preparation of hydrogels with different fluorescent colors.…”

Supramolecular polymer-assisted manipulation of triblock copolymers: understanding the relationships between microphase structures and mechanical properties

“…[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Furthermore, in our previous work, we found that the synergistic effect of supramolecular polymers and covalent polymers could endow materials with robust yet dynamic features. 24,25 Therefore, we speculate that utilizing supramolecular polymers to connect the A blocks of copolymers would be benecial to modulate the assembly structure of the hard domains and then result in enhanced strength and toughness. However, as far as we know, incorporating supramolecular polymers into hard domains of copolymers to act as physical cross-links has never been achieved.…”