Researchers from Tel Aviv University have successfully manufactured a new type of glass that, while retaining its transparency, is able to immediately merge with the touch of water at room temperature.
The research was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature.
The research, led by PhD student Gal Finkelstein-Zuta and Prof. Ehud Gazit of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research of the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering at TAU, could dramatically change the sustainability and cost of tools in a variety of industries. In particular, the discovery could revolutionize optics and electro-optics, satellite communications, remote sensing and biomedicine.
“In our laboratory we study bio-convergence and specifically use the wonderful properties of biology to produce innovative materials,” explains Prof. Gazit. “We study, among other things, sequences of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Amino acids and peptides have a natural tendency to link together and form ordered structures with a defined periodic arrangement, but during the research we discovered a unique peptide that behaves differently from anything we know: it did not form an ordered pattern , but an amorphous, disordered one, describing glass.”
How does the glass work?
The liquid glass has very little order at the molecular level, but its mechanical properties remain solid. While glass is usually made by rapidly cooling and then freezing heated materials in a process to crystallize glass, TAU discovered that the aromatic peptide, which consists of a three-tyrosine sequence (YYY), spontaneously forms a molecular glass, upon evaporation of an aqueous solution, under room temperature conditions.
“The commercial glass we all know is made by rapidly cooling molten materials, a process called vitrification,” said Gal Finkelstein-Zuta. “The amorphous liquid-like organization must be fixed before it arranges itself in a more energy-efficient way, such as in crystals, and that requires energy: it must be heated to high temperatures and immediately cooled. On the other hand, the glass we discovered forms that is made from biological building blocks, forming spontaneously at room temperature, without the need for energy such as high heat or pressure. Just dissolve a powder in water, just like making kool-aid, and the glass will form for example, lenses made from our new glass. Instead of a lengthy process of grinding and polishing, we simply dripped a drop onto a surface, where we controlled its curvature, and therefore its focus, by just adjusting the volume of the solution. .”
“This is the first time that anyone has succeeded in making molecular glass under simple conditions,” said Prof. Gazit, “but no less important than that are the properties of the glass we have made. It is a very special glass. On the one hand, it is very strong and on the other hand, it is very transparent – much more transparent than ordinary glass.
“The normal silicate glass that we all know is transparent in the visible light range, the molecular glass we have created is transparent deep into the infrared range. This has many applications in areas such as satellites, remote sensing, communications and optics.
“It is also a strong adhesive, it can bond different types of glass together, and at the same time it can repair the cracks that appear in them. It is a set of properties that are not found in any glass in the world, and which has great properties.” potential in science and engineering, and we got it all from a single peptide: one little piece of protein.”