Metal Chelation Dynamically Regulates the Mechanical Properties of Engineered Protein Hydrogels
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Engineering protein hydrogels with dynamically tunable mechanical and physical properties is of great interest due to their potential applications in biomedical engineering and mechanobiology. In our recent work, we engineered a novel dynamic protein hydrogel using a redox responsive, mutually exclusive protein (MEP)-based folding switch as the building block. By modulating the redox potential, the MEP-based folding switch can switch its conformation between two distinct states, leading to a significant change of the proteins’ effective contour length of the polypeptide chain and an effective change of the cross-linking density of the hydrogel network ( Kong, N. et al. Adv. Funct. Mater. 2014, 24, 7310). Building upon this work, here we report an engineered metal-chelation based method to dynamically regulate mechanical and physical properties of MEP-based protein hydrogels. We engineered a bihistidine metal binding motif in the host domain of the MEP. The binding of bivalent ions (such as Ni 2+ ) enhances the thermodynamic stability of the host domain and results in the shift of the conformational equilibrium between the two mutually exclusive conformations of the MEP. Thus, the bihistidine mutant can serve as a metal ion responsive-folding switch to regulate the conformational equilibrium of the MEP. Using this bihistidine mutant of MEP as building blocks, we engineered chemically cross-linked protein hydrogels. We found that the mechanical and physical properties (including Young’s modulus, resilience, and swelling degree) of this hydrogel can be regulated by metal chelation in a continuous and reversible fashion. This dynamic change is due to the metal chelation-induced shift of the conformational equilibrium of the MEP and consequently the effective cross-linking density of the hydrogel. Our results demonstrate a general strategy to engineer MEP-based dynamic protein hydrogels that may find applications in mechanobiology and tissue engineering.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it