Rationally Designed Dynamic Protein Hydrogels with Reversibly Tunable Mechanical Properties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Protein hydrogels have attracted considerable interest due to their potential applications in biomedical engineering. Creating protein hydrogels with dynamic mechanical properties is challenging. Here, the engineering of a novel, rationally designed protein‐hydrogel is reported that translates molecular level protein folding‐unfolding conformational changes into macroscopic reversibly tunable mechanical properties based on a redox controlled protein folding‐unfolding switch. This novel protein folding switch is constructed from a designed mutually exclusive protein. Via oxidation and reduction of an engineered disulfide bond, the protein folding switch can switch its conformation between folded and unfolded states, leading to a drastic change of protein's effective chain length and mechanical compliance. This redox‐responsive protein can be readily photochemically crosslinked into solid hydrogels, in which molecular level conformational changes (folding‐unfolding) can result in significant macroscopic changes in hydrogel's physical and mechanical properties due to the change of the effective chain length between two crosslinking points in the protein hydrogel network. It is found that when reduced, the hydrogel swells and is mechanically compliant; when oxidized, it swells to a less extent and becomes resilient and stiffer, exhibiting an up to fivefold increase in its Young's modulus. The changes of the mechanical and physical properties of this hydrogel are fully reversible and can be cycled using redox potential. This novel protein hydrogel with dynamic mechanical and physical properties could find numerous applications in material sciences and tissue engineering.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".