Dear Readers,

A major conference is starting this week! The American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall Meeting 2023 will be at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

For those attending, hope you have a wonderful and fruitful conference experience!

In The News

Research Updates

Transforming sustainable plant proteins into high performance lubricating microgels (Link)

• The meat industry is responsible for over 50% of food-linked emissions, making plant protein consumption a necessary step towards sustainability.

• The adoption of plant proteins is hindered by their astringent off-sensation, which is associated with high friction and poor lubrication performance.

• By transforming plant proteins into physically cross-linked microgels, their lubricity can be improved remarkably, making them a viable option for designing healthy, palatable, and sustainable foods.

• The microgels decrease boundary friction by an order of magnitude compared to native protein and replicate the lubrication performance of a 20:80 oil/water emulsion.

• The additional processing of plant-based proteins towards fabricating these functional and lubricating microgels appears to be negligible in terms of GHG emissions.

Low-Temperature Adaptive Dual-Network MXene Nanocomposite Hydrogel as Flexible Wearable Strain Sensors (Link)

• The team prepared a MXene-Polyacrylamide (PAM)/Agar hydrogel by adding MXene nanosheets into a hot AM-Agar mixed solution, thermally triggering AM crosslinking, and forming the double network MXene-PAM/Agar hydrogel after cooling.

• MXene is a two-dimensional structure of carbonized transition metal materials, and because of its good hydrophilic, conductive, and adjustable properties, it is often added to the hydrogel as a conductive filler.

• The unique point of this work is the strategic addition of glycerol to replace part of the water, which made the hydrogel have good frost resistance.

• This frost resistance increases the stability of the wearable sensor, extending its functionality over other works.

• The Mxene-PAM/Agar hydrogel-based sensor can be applied to detect various physiological activities of the human body, showing the great potential of its application for sports biomechanics, human motion monitoring, and medical examination.

Preparation of carboxymethylchitosan based rapid self-healing injectable hydrogels (Link)

• Carboxymethylchitosan (CMCS) hydrogels were prepared in a mixed system of isopropyl alcohol and water.

• It is doubly crosslinked with both physical and chemical linkers aldehyde-4-arm polyethylene glycol (4r-PEG-CHO) and ZnCl₂ at room temperature and pH=6. This synergistic effect helped to strengthen the hydrogel to storage modulus of ~1000 Pa.

• These hydrogels can self-heal within 1 min after being damaged, much faster than previous works of 2.5 h and 12 h.

• The prepared hydrogels have potential applications in the field of biomedicine, such as wound dressing, targeted drug delivery, electronic skin, tissue engineering, and hemostatic materials.

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