Catching up: towards bio-inspired catch-bonded materials
Jasper van der Gucht (Wageningen U., the Netherlands)
Many biological materials face conflicting mechanical demands: they must be dynamic and adaptable on the one hand, and robust and resilient on the other. Dynamicity asks for labile bonds that readily dissociate and reform, while resilience asks for strong and long-lived bonds. Nature has found a solution for these seemingly contrasting requirements: catch bonds. While conventional bonds weaken under tension, catch bonds do the opposite: they strengthen under stress. Under quiescent conditions the bonds are weak, allowing for the dynamic rearrangements necessary for cell functioning, but under conditions of high stress they stabilize, thereby protecting the cells against mechanical stress. Since their discovery two decades ago, catch bonds are now recognized as a crucial design element for controlling cellular mechanics. Yet, how catch bonds exactly perform their task at the scale of networks and cells is not well understood.
In this presentation, I will discuss two recent approaches from our group that aim to shed insight on this. In the first part, I will discuss simulation results of catch-bonded polymer networks that show how catch bonds collectively protect networks against mechanical damage, and in particular how the mobility of the bonds influences this. In the second part, I will share our efforts to design a synthetic DNA-based catch bond, by using a combination of computational design, experiments and simulations.
- J. Ruiz-Franco, J. Tauber & J. van der Gucht, “Cross-linker Mobility Governs Fracture Behavior of Catch-Bonded Networks”, Physical Review Letters 130 (118203), 2023.
- M. van Galen, A. Bok, T. Peshkovsky, J. van der Gucht, B. Albada & J. Sprakel, “De novo DNA-based catch bonds”, Nature Chemistry, in press, 2024.