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Protective coatings on extensible biofibres

Nature Materials volume 6, pages 669–672 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Formulating effective coatings for use in nano- and biotechnology poses considerable technical challenges1. If they are to provide abrasion resistance, coatings must be hard and adhere well to the underlying substrate2. High hardness, however, comes at the expense of extensibility3,4. This property trade-off makes the design of coatings for even moderately compliant substrates problematic, because substrate deformation easily exceeds the strain limit of the coating5. Although the highest strain capacity of synthetic fibre coatings is less than 10%, deformable coatings are ubiquitous in biological systems3,6. With an eye to heeding the lessons of nature, the cuticular coatings of byssal threads from two species of marine mussels, Mytilus galloprovincialis and Perna canaliculus, have been investigated. Consistent with their function to protect collagenous fibres in the byssal-thread core, these coatings show hardness and stiffness comparable to those of engineering plastics and yet are surprisingly extensible; the tensile failure strain of P. canaliculus cuticle is about 30% and that of M. galloprovincialis is a remarkable 70%. The difference in extensibility is attributable to the presence of deformable microphase-separated granules within the cuticle of M. galloprovincialis. The results have important implications in the design of bio-inspired extensible coatings.

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Figure 1: Ultrastructure of mussel thread cuticles.
Figure 2: Strain failure of mussel thread cuticles.
Figure 3: Microtears in granular composite cuticle.
Figure 4: Damage tolerance in granular composite cuticle.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank J. Weaver for continued discussion of this project. This work was supported by the National Institute of Health under awards No. R01 DE015415 and No. R01-GM65354. G.E.F. thanks the Austrian Academy of Science for a DOC fellowship. This work made use of the MRL central facilities at UCSB supported by the MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation under award No. DMR00-80034.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA

    Niels Holten-Andersen & J. Herbert Waite

  2. Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA

    Georg E. Fantner

  3. Asylum Research, Santa Barbara, California 93117, USA

    Sophia Hohlbauch

  4. Materials Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA

    Frank W. Zok

Authors
  1. Niels Holten-Andersen
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  2. Georg E. Fantner
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  3. Sophia Hohlbauch
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  4. J. Herbert Waite
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  5. Frank W. Zok
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Contributions

G.E.F. and S.H. contributed with experimental work and data analysis. J.H.W. contributed with experimental design, data analysis, manuscript writing and project research management. F.W.Z. contributed with experimental design, data analysis and manuscript writing.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to J. Herbert Waite or Frank W. Zok.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Holten-Andersen, N., Fantner, G., Hohlbauch, S. et al. Protective coatings on extensible biofibres. Nature Mater 6, 669–672 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1956

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