Bioinspired High Resilient Elastomers to Mimic Resilin

Zhongkai Wang, Liang Yuan, Feng Jiang, Yaqiong

Zhang, Zhigang Wang*, and Chuanbing Tang*

CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, Department of Polymer Science

and Engineering, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale,

University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China? Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry,

University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208, United States

ACS Macro Lett., 2016, 5 (2), pp 220-223

DOI:10.1021/acsmacrolett.5b00843Publication Date (Web): January 21,

2016Copyright © 2016 American Chemical Society*E-mail:

zgwang2@ustc.edu.cn., *E-mail: tang4@mailbox.sc.edu.

Congrats to Zhongkai!

Zhigang Wang etc. feel grateful to the Journal Editor and the two reviewers for their understanding to our idea and work, for their support, for their precious review comments, and finally for their encouragements to our continuous working on the project.

Natural resilin possesses outstanding mechanical properties, such as high strain, low stiffness, and high resilience, which are difficult to be reproduced in synthetic materials. We designed high resilient elastomers (HREs) with a network structure to mimic natural resilin on the basis of two natural abundant polymers, stiff cellulose and flexible polyisoprene. With plasticization via mineral oil and mechanical cyclic tensile deformation processing, HREs show ultrahigh resilience, high strain, and reasonable tensile strength that closely mimic natural resilin. Moreover, the mechanical properties of HREs can be finely tuned by adjusting the cellulose content, providing the opportunity to synthesize high resilient elastomers that mimic different elastic proteins, such as elastin.