Protein-Based Structural Materials

Protein-based materials, toward a new level of structural control.

Through billions of years of evolution nature has created and refined structural proteins for a wide variety of specific purposes. Amino acid sequences and their associated folding patterns combine to create elastic, rigid or tough materials. In many respects, nature's intricately designed products provide challenging examples for materials scientists, but translation of natural structural conc...

Protein-Based Drug-Delivery Materials

There is a pressing need for long-term, controlled drug release for sustained treatment of chronic or persistent medical conditions and diseases. Guided drug delivery is difficult because therapeutic compounds need to survive numerous transport barriers and binding targets throughout the body. Nanoscale protein-based polymers are increasingly used for drug and vaccine delivery to cross these bi...

Design of Protein Cage – Based Biohybrid Materials

Self-heating structural materials

Self-heating structural materials, being useful for deicing and space heating, are reviewed. They include cement–matrix and polymer–matrix composites that are rendered self-heating through enhancing their effectiveness for resistance heating. The enhancement is attained by the use of electrically conductive fibers (continuous or discontinuous) and interlayers. The interlaminar interface between...

Bioinspired structural materials.

Natural structural materials are built at ambient temperature from a fairly limited selection of components. They usually comprise hard and soft phases arranged in complex hierarchical architectures, with characteristic dimensions spanning from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The resulting materials are lightweight and often display unique combinations of strength and toughness, but have prove...