Life systems have evolved to utilize weak noncovalent interactions, particularly CH-π interaction, to achieve various biofunctions, for example cellular communication, immune response, and protein folding. However, for artificial materials, it remains a great challenge to recognize such weak interaction, further transform it into tunable macroscopic properties and realize special functions. Her...

Polymer-drug conjugates represent excellent nanopharmaceutical candidates, as they offer multiple advantages related to their intrinsic characteristics. Many of the said characteristics are provided by the covalent bonding between the drug and the polymer. However, their clinical development has been slow and only one polymer-drug conjugate has reached the market, thus there remains an urgent n...

Three design principles are presented that allow for the molecular design of functional polymer surfaces: surface segregation, surface structure, and surface reorganization. These design principles are illustrated by a description of the behavior of model endfunctional polymers that accurately reflect the general behavior of essentially all possible linear functional polymer architectures. Seve...

So far stimuli-responsive polymer gels and their application to smart materials have been widely studied. On the other hand, as a novel biomimetic gel, we developed gels with an autonomous self-oscillating function like a heart muscle, which was firstly reported in 1996. We designed the self-oscillating polymers and gels by utilizing the oscillating reaction, called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ...

We report a smart polymer membrane whose pore can be switched between the "closed" and "open" state just by passing CO2 and Ar in solution respectively. Compared with other stimuli, such as pH or temperature change, gas is an environmentally friendly and cost-effective stimulus for reversibly tuning the pore size and imparting the size selectivity of the membrane.

interactions occurring within the specific phase of the polymer–nanotube complex. This approach could be relevant for the development of smart devices for in situ functional healing actions activated by a signal transmitted from a sensing element on selective responses to a metabolite. Despite recent advances7, however, to become fully operational, smart devices based on carbon nanotube materia...

Mehran Abbasi Shirsavar, Mohammad Golzar, Mostafa Baghani, Mehrnoosh Taghavimehr. Composites and Smart Materials Research Laboratory, department of Mechanical Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran; Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Tarbiat Modares, Tehran, Iran; Assistant Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, ...