The research group of the University of Tokyo and the National Institute for Materials Science is artificially synthesizing an amoeba-like liquid that repeats a sol (liquid) state and a gel (solidified body) state by itself without applying any electricity, light, heat, etc. from the outside. Was the first successful in the world.
Periodic sol-gel changes are frequently observed in cell division, wound repair, cancer cell metastasis, amoeboid movement, etc., and are realized by the biopolymer called actin repeating assembly and dispersion by itself. Has been done.While such autonomous behavior has been recognized as extremely important from the viewpoint of maintaining biological phenomena, it is extremely difficult to artificially reproduce it, and there have been few reports so far.
The research group incorporates a chemical vibration reaction called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction into a polymer structure with a special molecular arrangement called an ABC-type triblock copolymer, so that synthetic polymers mimic actin and assemble. I devised a mechanism to repeat the dispersion by myself.Materials such as jelly and agar whose fluidity changes when heated or cooled have been widely known, but there has never been a material in which such a change occurs by itself, and this report has not only realized this for the first time. This is the first report in the world that has succeeded in artificially reproducing the function of actin.
This achievement, which has achieved a partial reproduction of life behavior seen in the living body, is considered to be a clue to consider the autonomy of life, and in the future, it will be like a living thing as depicted in science fiction movies. It has a strong potential to lead to the creation of soft machines.
Paper information:[Nature Communications] Amoeba-like self-oscillating polymer fluids with autonomous sol-gel transition
