Liquid metal-tailored gluten network for protein-based e-skin

作者：Bin Chen, Yudong Cao, Qiaoyu Li, Zhuo Yan, Rui Liu, Yunjiao Zhao, Xiang Zhang, Minying Wu, Yixiu Qin, Chang Sun, Wei Yao, Ziyi Cao, Pulickel Madhavapanicker Ajayan, Mason Oliver Lam Chee, Pei Dong, Zhaofen Li, Jianfeng Shen, Mingxin Ye · 发表于：Nature Communications · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1038/s41467-022-28901-9 · 被引用次数：130 · 研究领域：Advanced Sensor and Energy Harvesting Materials、Electrospun Nanofibers in Biomedical Applications、Silk-based biomaterials and applications

Designing electronic skin (e-skin) with proteins is a critical way to endow e-skin with biocompatibility, but engineering protein structures to achieve controllable mechanical properties and self-healing ability remains a challenge. Here, we develop a hybrid gluten network through the incorporation of a eutectic gallium indium alloy (EGaIn) to design a self-healable e-skin with improved mechanical properties. The intrinsic reversible disulfide bond/sulfhydryl group reconfiguration of gluten networks is explored as a driving force to introduce EGaIn as a chemical cross-linker, thus inducing secondary structure rearrangement of gluten to form additional β-sheets as physical cross-linkers. Remarkably, the obtained gluten-based material is self-healing, achieves synthetic material-like stretchability (>1600%) and possesses the ability to promote skin cell proliferation. The final e-skin is biocompatible and biodegradable and can sense strain changes from human motions of different scales. The protein network microregulation method paves the way for future skin-like protein-based e-skin.