By the College of Arts & Sciences
Living things are built by soft materials with intricate structures that can reconfigure in response to changes in their surroundings to carry out important, complex functions. These biological materials, like muscles, bones, or even the “skeleton” inside cells, are made of small units or molecules that organize into larger architectures of various shapes and sizes.
Inspired by nature, researchers from the department of applied physical sciences in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have designed biological building blocks that can organize into dynamic architectures able to reconfigure on demand. The structural design of these molecular building blocks successfully encoded the ability to form an exciting variety of shapes such as fibers, twisted fibers, spheres and bundles that can switch from one structure to the other.
New materials from the lab of Carolina researcher Ronit Freeman that can reconfigure on demand have potential for applications in diagnostics and drug delivery.
Read the full story at UNC.edu.
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