Graduate School of Nanobioscience, Yokohama City University, 22-2 Seto, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama 236-0027, Japan.
Precursory Research for Embryonic Science and Technology (PRESTO), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), 4-1-8 Honcho, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan.
ACS Appl Bio Mater. 2023 Mar 20;6(3):965-972. doi: 10.1021/acsabm.2c01033. Epub 2023 Feb 21.
Crystalline materials that are grown in gel media exhibit reinforced mechanical characteristics. Studies on the mechanical properties of protein crystals are limited in numbers because of the difficulty in growing high-quality large crystals. This study shows the demonstration of the unique macroscopic mechanical properties by compression tests of large protein crystals grown in both solution and agarose gel. Particularly, the gel-incorporating protein crystals exhibit larger elastic limits and a higher fracture stress compared with the native protein crystals without gel. Conversely, the change in the Young's modulus corresponding to if the crystals incorporate the gel network is negligible. This suggests that gel networks affect only the fracture phenomenon. Thus, reinforced mechanical characteristics that cannot be obtained by the gel or the protein crystal alone can be developed. By combining the gel media and protein crystals, the gel-incorporating protein crystals show the potential to toughen without sacrificing other mechanical properties.
在凝胶介质中生长的晶体材料表现出增强的机械特性。由于难以生长高质量的大晶体，因此对蛋白质晶体机械性能的研究数量有限。本研究通过对在溶液和琼脂糖凝胶中生长的大蛋白质晶体进行压缩试验，展示了其独特的宏观机械性能。特别是，与不含凝胶的天然蛋白质晶体相比，包含凝胶的蛋白质晶体具有更大的弹性极限和更高的断裂应力。相反，当晶体包含凝胶网络时，杨氏模量的变化可以忽略不计。这表明凝胶网络仅影响断裂现象。因此，可以开发出仅通过凝胶或蛋白质晶体无法获得的增强的机械特性。通过将凝胶介质和蛋白质晶体结合使用，包含凝胶的蛋白质晶体具有在不牺牲其他机械性能的情况下增韧的潜力。
