Hyperexpandable, self-healing macromolecular crystals with integrated polymer networks

Ling Zhang, Jake B. Bailey, Rohit H. Subramanian, Alexander Groisman and F. Akif Tezcan ()
Additional contact information
Ling Zhang: University of California, San Diego
Jake B. Bailey: University of California, San Diego
Rohit H. Subramanian: University of California, San Diego
Alexander Groisman: University of California, San Diego
F. Akif Tezcan: University of California, San Diego

Nature, 2018, vol. 557, issue 7703, 86-91

Abstract: Abstract The formation of condensed matter typically involves a trade-off between structural order and flexibility. As the extent and directionality of interactions between atomic or molecular components increase, materials generally become more ordered but less compliant, and vice versa. Nevertheless, high levels of structural order and flexibility are not necessarily mutually exclusive; there are many biological (such as microtubules1,2, flagella3, viruses4,5) and synthetic assemblies (for example, dynamic molecular crystals6–9 and frameworks10–13) that can undergo considerable structural transformations without losing their crystalline order and that have remarkable mechanical properties8,14,15 that are useful in diverse applications, such as selective sorption16, separation17, sensing18 and mechanoactuation19. However, the extent of structural changes and the elasticity of such flexible crystals are constrained by the necessity to maintain a continuous network of bonding interactions between the constituents of the lattice. Consequently, even the most dynamic porous materials tend to be brittle and isolated as microcrystalline powders14, whereas flexible organic or inorganic molecular crystals cannot expand without fracturing. Owing to their rigidity, crystalline materials rarely display self-healing behaviour20. Here we report that macromolecular ferritin crystals with integrated hydrogel polymers can isotropically expand to 180 per cent of their original dimensions and more than 500 per cent of their original volume while retaining periodic order and faceted Wulff morphologies. Even after the separation of neighbouring ferritin molecules by 50 ångströms upon lattice expansion, specific molecular contacts between them can be reformed upon lattice contraction, resulting in the recovery of atomic-level periodicity and the highest-resolution ferritin structure reported so far. Dynamic bonding interactions between the hydrogel network and the ferritin molecules endow the crystals with the ability to resist fragmentation and self-heal efficiently, whereas the chemical tailorability of the ferritin molecules enables the creation of chemically and mechanically differentiated domains within single crystals.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0057-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:557:y:2018:i:7703:d:10.1038_s41586-018-0057-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0057-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().