Synthetic gelatin-like material that apes a lobster’s underbelly has been created at MIT. The development of such material proves to be a giant leap in the medical field and even otherwise. As it can be a stepping stone in building high-quality artificial tissues. MIT engineers first reported in 2019 that a lobster’s underbelly is made with translucent material called hydrogel. Hydrogel is extremely high in tensile strength and also very flexible. This combination makes it an ideal material to make artificial tissues for human transplant. The news of the development of synthetic gelatin-like material is published in the science journal called the Matter.
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Synthetic gelatin-like material-fatigue resistant
Jiahua Ni and Shaoting Lin, Xinyue Raul Radovitzky, and many more are involved in developing the material. They used water, cross-linked polymers, and made the material using many strands of ultrathin hydrogel fibers. This made the material fatigue-resistant, which is the strongest feature of the material. Now, because the material was subjected to repeated stretching and relaxing, the result came out to be extremely positive for it. It dint develop cracks and fractures easily. And even if fractures developed, they happened after thousands and thousands of cycles taken together. The material even passed the test while it was put to high-humidity and high-temperature tests. Thus, it helps them conclude that this synthetic gelatin-like material could be nearly 50 times stronger& flexible than the existing nanomaterial.
Quotes from researchers:
Lin quotes, “We learned that this bouligand structure in the lobster underbelly has high mechanical performance, which motivated us to see if we could reproduce such structures in synthetic materials,” He further adds that “For a hydrogel material to be a load-bearing artificial tissue, both strength and deformability are required”.
Now, along with MIT, the US army supported the research. It is very positively speculated that the research certainly paves the way to develop artificial tissue which will be compatible with the human body. And can be used as a replacement for many injured parts when needed.
