Reversible bonds and local stresses in biological and synthetic soft materials: pathways to tunable mechanical response

Natural materials, both those inside cells and those that surround cells, owe their mechanical qualities to a combination of composition – what they are made of – and architecture – how they are made of this. A recurring motif in these materials is structural hierarchy; different architectures are employed at different length scales. This principle leads to great versatility; a limited set of constituent ‘building blocks’ produce a wide variety of mechanical properties. To understand precisely how mechanical properties arise in such hierarchical materials is both interesting from a fundamental point of view, but also from the point of view of materials science as these principles may offer inspiration for the rational design of novel synthetic materials.

In this talk I will introduce some of the models and computational techniques we use to understand the peculiar properties of reversible protein-protein bonds that hold together biomaterials, go up in scale to predict the rheological properties of soft networks, and will illustrate how we leverage this increased understanding in the recent design of novel synthetics that hierarchically self-assemble into biomimetic hydrogels.