Get the full paper here: Nano Letters 16, 5167 (2016); (Highlighted in SCIENCE; 353, 787, 2016). Nature provides design paradigms for adaptive, self-healing, and synergistic high-performance structural materials. Nacre’s brick-and-mortar architecture is renowned for combining stiffness, toughness, strength, and lightweightness. Although elaborate approaches exist to mimic its static structure and performance, and to incorporate functionalities for the engineering world, there

Get the full paper at: Nano Letters, doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b03940 (2016) Compartmentalization in soft matter is important for segregating and coordinating chemical reactions, sequestering (re)active components, and integrating multifunctionality. Advances depend crucially on quantitative 3D visualization in situ with high spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we show the direct visualization of different compartments within adaptive microgels using a combination of in situ el

Get the full paper here: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 55, 11261 (2016). Progress in colloid self-assembly crucially depends on finding preparation methods for anisotropic particles with recognition motifs to facilitate superstructure formation. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that Direct Laser Writing (DLW) can be used to fabricate uniform populations of anisotropic cone particles, suitable for shape recognition-driven self-assembly. Depletion forces guide the self-assembly

Get the full paper here: Biomacromolecules, 17, 2417, (2016). Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) are considered next generation, renewable reinforcements for sustainable, high-performance bioinspired nanocomposites uniting high stiffness, strength and toughness. However, the challenges associated with making well-defined CNF/polymer nanopaper hybrid structures with well-controlled polymer properties have so far hampered to deduce a quantitative picture of the mechanical properties

Get the full paper here: Materials, 9, 560, (2016). Materials based on biodegradable polyesters, such as poly(butylene terephthalate) (PBT) or poly(butylene terephthalate-co-poly(alkylene glycol) terephthalate) (PBTAT), have potential application as pro-regenerative scaffolds for bone tissue engineering. Herein, the preparation of films composed of PBT or PBTAT and an engineered spider silk protein, (eADF4(C16)), that displays multiple carboxylic acid moieties capable of bind

Get the full paper here: Macromol. Rapid. Comm. 37, 1521 (2016). This study reports a simple and versatile synthesis route for the preparation of highly uniform and densely functionalized aqueous microgels by modification of latex particles composed of an active ester monomer (pentafluorophenyl acrylate; PFPA). The hydrophobic nature of the PFPA allows synthesizing very uniform latex particles via emulsion polymerization, whose size can be controlled by the surfactant concent

Get the full paper here: Chem. Comm. 52, 8753 (2016). We introduce recodable surfaces solely based on reversible artificial hydrogen bonding interactions. We show that a symmetrical oligoamide (SOA) attached to poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) can be repeatedly immobilized and cleaved off spatially defined surface domains photochemically functionalized with asymmetric oligoamides (AOAs). The spatially resolved recodability is imaged and quantified via ToF-SIMS.

Get the full paper here: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 55, 1521 (2016). Mechanical gradients are important as tough joints, for strain field engineering in printable electronics, for actuators, and for biological studies, yet they are difficult to prepare and quantitatively characterize. We demonstrate the additive fabrication of gradient bioinspired nanocomposites based on stiff, renewable cellulose nanofibrils that are bottom-up toughened via a tailor-made copolymer. Direct filamen

Get the full paper here: ACS Appl. Mat. Interface 8, 11031 (2016). Natural composites are hierarchically structured by combination of ordered colloidal and molecular length scales. They inspire future, biomimetic, and lightweight nanocomposites, in which extraordinary mechanical properties are in reach by understanding and mastering hierarchical structure formation as tools to engineer multiscale deformation mechanisms. Here we describe a hierarchically self-assembled, choles

Get the full paper here: Biomacromolecules, 17, 905 (2016). The merging of defined nanoscale building blocks with advanced additive manufacturing techniques is of eminent importance for the preparation of multiscale and highly functional materials with de novo designed hierarchical architectures. Here, we demonstrate that hydrogels of cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) can be processed into complex shapes, and used as a sacrificial template to prepare freestanding cell constructs. W