In situ mechanical reinforcement of polymer hydrogels via metal-coordinated crosslink mineralization
Name
s41467-021-20953-7.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.68 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
09760f9ab12bb80cc0ec92fbc46dcf08
Author(s)
Kim, Sungjin
Regitsky, Abigail U.
Song, Jake
Ilavsky, Jan
McKinley, Gareth H.
Holten-Andersen, Niels
Date Issued
January 2021
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Kim, Sungjin, Regitsky, Abigail U, Song, Jake, Ilavsky, Jan, McKinley, Gareth H et al. 2021. "In situ mechanical reinforcement of polymer hydrogels via metal-coordinated crosslink mineralization." Nature Communications, 12 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2021, The Author(s). Biological organic-inorganic materials remain a popular source of inspiration for bioinspired materials design and engineering. Inspired by the self-assembling metal-reinforced mussel holdfast threads, we tested if metal-coordinate polymer networks can be utilized as simple composite scaffolds for direct in situ crosslink mineralization. Starting with aqueous solutions of polymers end-functionalized with metal-coordinating ligands of catechol or histidine, here we show that inter-molecular metal-ion coordination complexes can serve as mineral nucleation sites, whereby significant mechanical reinforcement is achieved upon nanoscale particle growth directly at the metal-coordinate network crosslink sites.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-20953-7
