Accumulation of collagen molecular unfolding is the mechanism of cyclic fatigue damage and failure in collagenous tissues
Name
sciadv.aba2795.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.1 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
efd3691b91d4a8f17947b8fac1a83eeb
Author(s)
Zitnay, Jared L
Jung, Gang Seob
Lin, Allen H
Qin, Zhao
Li, Yang
Yu, S Michael
Buehler, Markus J
Weiss, Jeffrey A
Date Issued
August 28, 2020
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Zitnay, Jared L, Jung, Gang Seob, Lin, Allen H, Qin, Zhao, Li, Yang et al. 2020. "Accumulation of collagen molecular unfolding is the mechanism of cyclic fatigue damage and failure in collagenous tissues." Science Advances, 6 (35).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 The Authors. Overuse injuries to dense collagenous tissues are common, but their etiology is poorly understood. The predominant hypothesis that micro-damage accumulation exceeds the rate of biological repair is missing a mechanistic explanation. Here, we used collagen hybridizing peptides to measure collagen molecular damage during tendon cyclic fatigue loading and computational simulations to identify potential explanations for our findings. Our results revealed that triple-helical collagen denaturation accumulates with increasing cycles of fatigue loading, and damage is correlated with creep strain independent of the cyclic strain rate. Finite-element simulations demonstrated that biphasic fluid flow is a possible fascicle-level mechanism to explain the rate dependence of the number of cycles and time to failure. Molecular dynamics simulations demonstrated that triple-helical unfolding is rate dependent, revealing rate-dependent mechanisms at multiple length scales in the tissue. The accumulation of collagen molecular denaturation during cyclic loading provides a long-sought "micro-damage"mechanism for the development of overuse injuries.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIADV.ABA2795
