MOVE over, Popeye. Super-elastic molecules that stop our muscles from overloading have been copied, and could form the basis of artificial body parts for transplantation.
The synthesised molecules mimic titin, a protein in muscle which absorbs elastic stress. A team led by at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, used them to construct elastic bands the size of wedding rings. Crucially, like titin, they are springy when stretched with moderate force, but soak up energy without stretching any further at higher loadings (Nature, ).
Li’s team combined synthetic resolin, a springy molecule originally found in insects, with GB1, an energy-dissipating protein from bacteria. They hope the materials could one day be combined with human cells to construct artificial body parts.
Advertisement
