

Turning Weakness Into Strength– how Biological Materials Combine Strength, Toughness and Adaptability
Abstract
Biology exquisitely creates hierarchical structures, where initiated at nano scales, are exhibited in macro or physiological multifunctional materials to provide structural support, force generation, catalytic properties, or energy conversion [1, 2]. This is exemplified in a broad range of biological materials such as hair, skin, bone, spider silk or cells. For instance, despite its simple building blocks spider silk is one of the strongest, most extensible and toughest biological materials known, exceeding the properties of many engineered materials including steel [3, 4]. This is particularly puzzling since despite its great strength, spider silk is made of some of the weakest chemical bonds known, H-bonds. We have discovered that the great strength and extensibility of spider silk can be explained based on its particular structural makeup, which involves several hierarchical levels from the nano- to the macro-scale. Thereby, the structural confinement of H-bonds into ultra-small beta-sheet nanocrystals with dimensions of only a few nanometers is the key to overcome the intrinsic limitations of H-bonds, creating mechanically strong, tough and resilient cross-linking domains between a semi-amorphous phase composed of 31 protein helices [5-8]. Our work unveils a material design strategy that enables silks to achieve superior material properties despite its simple and structurally inferior material constituents. Exploiting this concept could lead to a novel materials design paradigm, where enhanced functionality is not achieved using complex building blocks but rather through the utilization of universal repetitive constitutive elements arranged in hierarchical structures. We discuss analogies with other protein materials such as collagen and intermediate filaments, and present approaches towards the design of adaptable, mutable and active materials using a computational materiomics approach [9].
Keywords
Silk, nanomechanics, deformation, materiomicsText