Liao Yifan, Le Roi Baptiste, Zhang Hang, Diesendruck Charles E, Grolman Joshua M
Materials Science and Engineering Department, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel.
Shulich Faculty of Chemistry, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel.
J Am Chem Soc. 2024 Jul 3;146(26):17878-17886. doi: 10.1021/jacs.4c03534. Epub 2024 Jun 20.
Mechanical forces play critical roles in a wide variety of biological processes and diseases, yet measuring them directly at the molecular level remains one of the main challenges of mechanobiology. Here, we show a strategy to "Dip-conjugate" biologically derived materials at the chemical level to mechanophores, force-responsive molecular entities, using Click-chemistry. Contrary to classical prepolymerization mechanophore incorporation, this new protocol leads to detectable mechanochromic response with as low as 5% strain, finally making mechanophores relevant for many biological processes that have previously been inaccessible. Our results demonstrate the ubiquity of the technique with activation in synthetic polymers, carbohydrates, and proteins under mechanical force, with alpaca wool fibers as a key example. These results push the limits for mechanophore use in far more types of polymeric materials in applications ranging from molecular-level force damage detection to direct and quantitative 3D force measurements in mechanobiology.
机械力在各种各样的生物过程和疾病中发挥着关键作用，然而在分子水平上直接测量它们仍然是机械生物学的主要挑战之一。在这里，我们展示了一种策略，即利用点击化学在化学水平上把生物衍生材料“浸渍共轭”到机械力感受器（力响应分子实体）上。与传统的预聚合机械力感受器掺入方法不同，这种新方案在低至5%的应变下就能产生可检测到的机械变色响应，最终使机械力感受器适用于许多以前无法实现的生物过程。我们的结果证明了该技术的普遍性，它能在机械力作用下激活合成聚合物、碳水化合物和蛋白质，羊驼毛纤维就是一个关键例子。这些结果拓展了机械力感受器在更多类型聚合物材料中的应用范围，涵盖从分子水平的力损伤检测到机械生物学中直接和定量的三维力测量等应用。
