The First Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University, Key Laboratory of Emergency and Trauma, Ministry of Education, College of Emergency and Trauma, Hainan Medical University, Haikou 571199, China.
State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials, College of Chemistry, Jilin University, 2699 Qianjin Street, Changchun 130012, China.
Biomacromolecules. 2020 Oct 12;21(10):4212-4219. doi: 10.1021/acs.biomac.0c01002. Epub 2020 Sep 18.
The elegant elasticity and toughness of muscles that are controlled by myofilament sliding, highly elastic springlike properties of titin, and Ca-induced conformational change of the troponin complex have been a source of inspiration to develop advanced materials for simulating elastic muscle motion. Herein, a highly stretchable protein hydrogel is developed to mimic the structure and motion of muscles through the combination of protein folding-unfolding and molecular sliding. It has been shown that the protein bovine serum albumin is covalently cross-linked, together penetrated with alginate chains to construct polyprotein-based hydrogels, where polyproteins can act as the elastic spring titin via protein folding-unfolding and also achieve tunable sliding facilitated by alginate due to their reversible noncovalent interactions, thus providing desired mechanical properties such as stretchability, resilience, and strength. Notably, these biomaterials can achieve the breaking strain of up to 1200% and show massive energy dissipation. A pronounced expansion-contraction phenomenon is also observed on the macroscopic scale, and the Ca-induced contraction process may help to improve our understanding of muscle movement. Overall, these excellent properties are comparable to or even better than those of natural muscles, making the polyprotein-based hydrogels represent a new type of muscle-mimetic biomaterial. Significantly, the prominent biocompatibility of the designed biomaterials further enables them to hold potential applications in the biomedical field and tissue engineering.
肌丝滑动控制的肌肉的优雅弹性和韧性、titin 的高弹性弹簧特性以及钙诱导的肌钙蛋白复合物构象变化，为开发模拟弹性肌肉运动的先进材料提供了灵感。在此，通过蛋白质折叠-展开和分子滑动的结合，开发了一种高拉伸的蛋白质水凝胶，以模拟肌肉的结构和运动。结果表明，牛血清白蛋白通过共价交联与海藻酸盐链一起渗透，构建了基于聚蛋白的水凝胶，其中聚蛋白可以通过蛋白质折叠-展开充当弹性弹簧 titin，并且由于其可逆的非共价相互作用，还可以实现可调节的滑动，从而提供所需的机械性能，如拉伸性、弹性和强度。值得注意的是，这些生物材料可以实现高达 1200%的断裂应变，并显示出大量的能量耗散。在宏观尺度上也观察到明显的伸缩现象，而钙诱导的收缩过程可能有助于我们理解肌肉运动。总的来说，这些优异的性能可与天然肌肉相媲美，甚至更好，使基于聚蛋白的水凝胶成为一种新型的肌肉模拟生物材料。重要的是，设计的生物材料具有突出的生物相容性，使其有可能在生物医学领域和组织工程中得到应用。
