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Conformation-driven strategy for resilient and functional protein materials
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Conformation-driven strategy for resilient and functional protein materials

Xuan Mu, John S K Yuan Jr, Jaewon Choi, Yixin Zhang, Peggy Cebe, Xiaocheng Jiang, Yu Shrike Zhang and David L Kaplan
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, Vol.119(4), p.1
01/25/2022
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2115523119
PMCID: PMC8795527
PMID: 35074913
url
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115523119View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

The exceptional elastic resilience of some protein materials underlies essential biomechanical functions with broad interest in biomedical fields. However, molecular design of elastic resilience is restricted to amino acid sequences of a handful of naturally occurring resilient proteins such as resilin and elastin. Here, we exploit non-resilin/elastin sequences that adopt kinetically stabilized, random coil-dominated conformations to achieve near-perfect resilience comparable with that of resilin and elastin. We also show a direct correlation between resilience and Raman-characterized protein conformations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that metastable conformation of proteins enables the construction of mechanically graded protein materials that exhibit spatially controlled conformations and resilience. These results offer insights into molecular mechanisms of protein elastomers and outline a general conformation-driven strategy for developing resilient and functional protein materials.
Amino Acid Sequence Fibroins - chemistry Models, Molecular Protein Conformation Proteins - chemistry Spectrum Analysis Structure-Activity Relationship

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