Tag Archives: Joanna Aizenberg

Tough colour and the flower beetle

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The flower beetle Torynorrhina flammea. [downloaded from https://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology-news2/newsid=58269.php]

That is one gorgeous beetle and a June 17, 2021 news item on Nanowerk reveals that it features in a structural colour story (i.e, how structures rather than pigments create colour),

The unique mechanical and optical properties found in the exoskeleton of a humble Asian beetle has the potential to offer a fascinating new insight into how to develop new, effective bio-inspired technologies.

Pioneering new research by a team of international scientists, including Professor Pete Vukusic from the University of Exeter, has revealed a distinctive, and previously unknown property within the carapace of the flower beetle – a member of the scarab beetle family.

The study showed that the beetle has small micropillars within the carapace – or the upper section of the exoskeleton – that give the insect both strength and flexibility to withstand damage very effectively.

Crucially, these micropillars are incorporated into highly regular layering in the exoskeleton that concurrently give the beetle an intensely bright metallic colour appearance.

…

A June 18, 2021 University of Exeter press release (also on EurekAlert but published June 17, 2021), delves further into the researchers’ new insights,

For this new study, the scientists used sophisticated modelling techniques to determine which of the two functions – very high mechanical strength or conspicuously bright colour – were more important to the survival of the beetle.

They found that although these micropillars do create a highly enhanced toughness of the beetle shell, they were most beneficial for optimising the scattering of coloured light that generates its conspicuous appearance.

The research is published this week in the leading journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS.

Professor Vukusic, one of three leads of the research along with Professor Li at Virginia Tech and Professor Kolle at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], said: “The astonishing insights generated by this research have only been possible through close collaborative work between Virginia Tech, MIT, Harvard and Exeter, in labs that trailblaze the fields of materials, mechanics and optics. Our follow-up venture to make use of these bio-inspired principles will be an even more exciting journey.”.

The seeds of the pioneering research were sown more than 16 years ago as part of a short project created by Professor Vukusic in the Exeter undergraduate Physics labs. Those early tests and measurements, made by enthusiastic undergraduate students, revealed the possibility of intriguing multifunctionality.

The original students examined the form and structure of beetles’ carapce to try to understand the simple origin of their colour. They noticed for the first time, however, the presence of strength-inducing micropillars.

Professor Vukusic ultimately carried these initial findings to collaborators Professor Ling Li at Virginia Tech and Professor Mathias Kolle at Harvard and then MIT who specialise in the materials sciences and applied optics. Using much more sophisticated measurement and modelling techniques, the combined research team were also to confirm the unique role played by the micropillars in enhancing the beetles’ strength and toughness without compromising its intense metallic colour.

The results from the study could also help inspire a new generation of bio-inspired materials, as well as the more traditional evolutionary research.

By understanding which of the functions provides the greater benefit to these beetles, scientists can develop new techniques to replicate and reproduce the exoskeleton structure, while ensuring that it has brilliant colour appearance with highly effective strength and toughness.

Professor Vukusic added: “Such natural systems as these never fail to impress with the way in which they perform, be it optical, mechanical or in another area of function. The way in which their optical or mechanical properties appear highly tolerant of all manner of imperfections too, continues to offer lessons to us about scientific and technological avenues we absolutely should explore. There is exciting science ahead of us on this journey.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Microstructural design for mechanical–optical multifunctionality in the exoskeleton of the flower beetle Torynorrhina flammea by Zian Jia, Matheus C. Fernandes, Zhifei Deng, Ting Yang, Qiuting Zhang, Alfie Lethbridge, Jie Yin, Jae-Hwang Lee, Lin Han, James C. Weaver, Katia Bertoldi, Joanna Aizenberg, Mathias Kolle, Pete Vukusic, and Ling Li. PNAS June 22, 2021 118 (25) e2101017118; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101017118

This paper is behind a paywall.

Colo(u)r-changing bandage for better compression

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This is a structural colo(u)r story, from a May 29, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

Compression therapy is a standard form of treatment for patients who suffer from venous ulcers and other conditions in which veins struggle to return blood from the lower extremities. Compression stockings and bandages, wrapped tightly around the affected limb, can help to stimulate blood flow. But there is currently no clear way to gauge whether a bandage is applying an optimal pressure for a given condition.

Now engineers at MIT {Massachusetts Institute of Technology] have developed pressure-sensing photonic fibers that they have woven into a typical compression bandage. As the bandage is stretched, the fibers change color. Using a color chart, a caregiver can stretch a bandage until it matches the color for a desired pressure, before, say, wrapping it around a patient’s leg.

The photonic fibers can then serve as a continuous pressure sensor — if their color changes, caregivers or patients can use the color chart to determine whether and to what degree the bandage needs loosening or tightening.

A May 29, 2018 MIT news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail,

“Getting the pressure right is critical in treating many medical conditions including venous ulcers, which affect several hundred thousand patients in the U.S. each year,” says Mathias Kolle, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “These fibers can provide information about the pressure that the bandage exerts. We can design them so that for a specific desired pressure, the fibers reflect an easily distinguished color.”

Kolle and his colleagues have published their results in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials. Co-authors from MIT include first author Joseph Sandt, Marie Moudio, and Christian Argenti, along with J. Kenji Clark of the Univeristy of Tokyo, James Hardin of the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, Matthew Carty of Brigham and Women’s Hospital-Harvard Medical School, and Jennifer Lewis of Harvard University.

Natural inspiration

The color of the photonic fibers arises not from any intrinsic pigmentation, but from their carefully designed structural configuration. Each fiber is about 10 times the diameter of a human hair. The researchers fabricated the fiber from ultrathin layers of transparent rubber materials, which they rolled up to create a jelly-roll-type structure. Each layer within the roll is only a few hundred nanometers thick.

In this rolled-up configuration, light reflects off each interface between individual layers. With enough layers of consistent thickness, these reflections interact to strengthen some colors in the visible spectrum, for instance red, while diminishing the brightness of other colors. This makes the fiber appear a certain color, depending on the thickness of the layers within the fiber.

“Structural color is really neat, because you can get brighter, stronger colors than with inks or dyes just by using particular arrangements of transparent materials,” Sandt says. “These colors persist as long as the structure is maintained.”

The fibers’ design relies upon an optical phenomenon known as “interference,” in which light, reflected from a periodic stack of thin, transparent layers, can produce vibrant colors that depend on the stack’s geometric parameters and material composition. Optical interference is what produces colorful swirls in oily puddles and soap bubbles. It’s also what gives peacocks and butterflies their dazzling, shifting shades, as their feathers and wings are made from similarly periodic structures.

“My interest has always been in taking interesting structural elements that lie at the origin of nature’s most dazzling light manipulation strategies, to try recreating and employing them in useful applications,” Kolle says.

A multilayered approach

The team’s approach combines known optical design concepts with soft materials, to create dynamic photonic materials.

While a postdoc at Harvard in the group of Professor Joanna Aizenberg, Kolle was inspired by the work of Pete Vukusic, professor of biophotonics at the University of Exeter in the U.K., on Margaritaria nobilis, a tropical plant that produces extremely shiny blue berries. The fruits’ skin is made up of cells with a periodic cellulose structure, through which light can reflect to give the fruit its signature metallic blue color.

Together, Kolle and Vukusic sought ways to translate the fruit’s photonic architecture into a useful synthetic material. Ultimately, they fashioned multilayered fibers from stretchable materials, and assumed that stretching the fibers would change the individual layers’ thicknesses, enabling them to tune the fibers’ color. The results of these first efforts were published in Advanced Materials in 2013.

When Kolle joined the MIT faculty in the same year, he and his group, including Sandt, improved on the photonic fiber’s design and fabrication. In their current form, the fibers are made from layers of commonly used and widely available transparent rubbers, wrapped around highly stretchable fiber cores. Sandt fabricated each layer using spin-coating, a technique in which a rubber, dissolved into solution, is poured onto a spinning wheel. Excess material is flung off the wheel, leaving a thin, uniform coating, the thickness of which can be determined by the wheel’s speed.

For fiber fabrication, Sandt formed these two layers on top of a water-soluble film on a silicon wafer. He then submerged the wafer, with all three layers, in water to dissolve the water-soluble layer, leaving the two rubbery layers floating on the water’s surface. Finally, he carefully rolled the two transparent layers around a black rubber fiber, to produce the final colorful photonic fiber.

Reflecting pressure

The team can tune the thickness of the fibers’ layers to produce any desired color tuning, using standard optical modeling approaches customized for their fiber design.

“If you want a fiber to go from yellow to green, or blue, we can say, ‘This is how we have to lay out the fiber to give us this kind of [color] trajectory,'” Kolle says. “This is powerful because you might want to have something that reflects red to show a dangerously high strain, or green for ‘ok.’ We have that capacity.”

The team fabricated color-changing fibers with a tailored, strain-dependent color variation using the theoretical model, and then stitched them along the length of a conventional compression bandage, which they previously characterized to determine the pressure that the bandage generates when it’s stretched by a certain amount.

The team used the relationship between bandage stretch and pressure, and the correlation between fiber color and strain, to draw up a color chart, matching a fiber’s color (produced by a certain amount of stretching) to the pressure that is generated by the bandage.

To test the bandage’s effectiveness, Sandt and Moudio enlisted over a dozen student volunteers, who worked in pairs to apply three different compression bandages to each other’s legs: a plain bandage, a bandage threaded with photonic fibers, and a commercially-available bandage printed with rectangular patterns. This bandage is designed so that when it is applying an optimal pressure, users should see that the rectangles become squares.

Overall, the bandage woven with photonic fibers gave the clearest pressure feedback. Students were able to interpret the color of the fibers, and based on the color chart, apply a corresponding optimal pressure more accurately than either of the other bandages.

The researchers are now looking for ways to scale up the fiber fabrication process. Currently, they are able to make fibers that are several inches long. Ideally, they would like to produce meters or even kilometers of such fibers at a time.

“Currently, the fibers are costly, mostly because of the labor that goes into making them,” Kolle says. “The materials themselves are not worth much. If we could reel out kilometers of these fibers with relatively little work, then they would be dirt cheap.”

Then, such fibers could be threaded into bandages, along with textiles such as athletic apparel and shoes as color indicators for, say, muscle strain during workouts. Kolle envisions that they may also be used as remotely readable strain gauges for infrastructure and machinery.

“Of course, they could also be a scientific tool that could be used in a broader context, which we want to explore,” Kolle says.

Here’s what the bandage looks like,

Caption: Engineers at MIT have developed pressure-sensing photonic fibers that they have woven into a typical compression bandage. Credit Courtesy of the researchers

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Stretchable Optomechanical Fiber Sensors for Pressure Determination in Compressive Medical Textiles by Joseph D. Sandt, Marie Moudio, J. Kenji Clark, James Hardin, Christian Argenti, Matthew Carty, Jennifer A. Lewis, Mathias Kolle. Advanced Healthcare Materials https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.201800293 First published: 29 May 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

Slip sliding away—making surfaces bacteria can’t grasp onto

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Here’s another biomimicry story with a connection to Harvard University. From a Nov. 1, 2016 Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Harvard Medical School Teaching Hospital) news release (also on EurekAlert),

Implanted medical devices like catheters, surgical mesh and dialysis systems are ideal surfaces on which bacteria can colonize and form hard-to-kill sheets called biofilms. Known as biofouling, this contamination of devices is responsible for more than half of the 1.7 million hospital-acquired infections in the United States each year.

In a report published in Biomaterials today, a team of scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University has demonstrated that an innovative, ultra-low adhesive coating prevented bacteria from attaching to surfaces treated with it, reducing bacterial adhesion by more than 98 percent in laboratory tests.

“Device related infections remain a significant problem in medicine, burdening society with millions of dollars in health care costs,” said Elliot Chaikof, MD, PhD, chair of the Roberta and Stephen R. Weiner Department of Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief at BIDMC and an associate faculty member at the Wyss Institute. “Antibiotics alone will not solve this problem. We need to use new approaches to minimize the risk of infection, and this strategy is a very important step in that direction.”

The self-healing slippery surface coatings – known as ‘slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces’ (SLIPS) – were developed by Joanna Aizenberg, PhD, a Wyss Institute core faculty member, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS at Harvard University. Inspired by the carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plant that uses the slippery surface of its leaves to trap insects, Aizenberg engineered surface coatings that work to repel a variety of substances across a broad range of temperature, pressure and other environmental conditions. They are stable when exposed to UV light, and are low-cost and simple to manufacture. The current study is the first to demonstrate that SLIPS not only limit the ability of bacteria to adhere to surfaces, but also impede infection in an animal model.

SLIPS has been mentioned here before, most recently in a March 2, 2016 posting and before that in an Oct. 14, 2014 posting which appears to be precursor work for this latest research.

Getting back to the Nov. 1, 2016 news release, here’s more about plans for SLIPS and about recent trials,

“We are developing SLIPS recipes for a variety of medical applications by working with different medical-grade materials, ensuring the stability of the coating, and carefully pairing the non-fouling properties of the SLIPS materials to specific contaminates, environments and performance requirements,” said Aizenberg. “Here we have extended our repertoire and applied the SLIPS concept very convincingly to medical-grade lubricants, demonstrating its enormous potential in implanted devices prone to bacterial fouling and infection.”

In a series of trials, the researchers tested three SLIPS lubricants for their anti-adhesive qualities. First, they incubated disks of SLIPS-coated medical material ePTFE – a microporous form of Teflon – in a broth of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), a generally harmless bacterium found in the nose and on skin, but one of the most common causes of hospital-acquired infections. After 48 hours, the three variations of SLIPS-treated disks demonstrated 98.3, 99.1 and 99.7 percent reductions in bacterial adhesion.

To test the material’s stability, the scientists performed the same experiment after soaking the SLIPS-coated samples for up to 21 days in a solution meant to simulate conditions inside a living mammal. After exposing these disks to S. aureus for 48 hours, the researchers found similar, nearly 100 percent reductions in bacterial adhesion.

Widely used clinically, medical mesh is particularly susceptible to bacterial infection. In another set of experiments to test the material’s biocompatibility, Chaikof and colleagues implanted small squares of SLIPS-treated mesh into murine models, injecting the site with S. aureus 24 hours later. Three days later, when the researchers removed the implanted mesh, they found little to no infection, compared with an infection rate of more than 90 percent among controls.

“Today, patients who receive implants often require antibiotics to keep the risk of bacterial infection at bay,” the authors wrote. “SLIPS coatings one day could obviate the widespread use of antibiotics and minimize the development of antibiotic resistant micro-organisms.”

“SLIPs have many promising medical applications that are in a very early stage of evaluation,” said Chaikof. “Clearly, there’s more work to be done before its introduction into the clinic, but this is one of a few studies that reinforces the exciting opportunities presented by this strategy to improve device performance and clinical outcomes.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

An immobilized liquid interface prevents device associated bacterial infection in vivo by Jiaxuan Chen, Caitlin Howell, Carolyn A. Haller, Madhukar S. Patel, Perla Ayala, Katherine A. Moravec, Erbin Dai, Liying Liu, Irini Sotiri, Michael Aizenberg, Joanna Aizenberg, Elliot L. Chaikof. Biomaterials Volume 113, January 2017, Pages 80–92  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biomaterials.2016.09.028

This paper is behind a paywall.

Namib beetles, cacti, and pitcher plants teach scientists at Harvard University (US)

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In this latest work from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, scientists have looked at three desert dwellers for survival strategies in water-poor areas. From a Feb. 25, 2015 news item on Nanowerk,

Organisms such as cacti and desert beetles can survive in arid environments because they’ve evolved mechanisms to collect water from thin air. The Namib desert beetle, for example, collects water droplets on the bumps of its shell while V-shaped cactus spines guide droplets to the plant’s body.

As the planet grows drier, researchers are looking to nature for more effective ways to pull water from air. Now, a team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have drawn inspiration from these organisms to develop a better way to promote and transport condensed water droplets.

A Feb. 24, 2016 Harvard University press release by Leah Burrows (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

“Everybody is excited about bioinspired materials research,” said Joanna Aizenberg, the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and core faculty member of the Wyss Institute. “However, so far, we tend to mimic one inspirational natural system at a time. Our research shows that a complex bio-inspired approach, in which we marry multiple biological species to come up with non-trivial designs for highly efficient materials with unprecedented properties, is a new, promising direction in biomimetics.”

The new system, described in Nature, is inspired by the bumpy shell of desert beetles, the asymmetric structure of cactus spines and slippery surfaces of pitcher plants. The material harnesses the power of these natural systems, plus Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces technology (SLIPS) developed in Aizenberg’s lab, to collect and direct the flow of condensed water droplets.

This approach is promising not only for harvesting water but also for industrial heat exchangers.

“Thermal power plants, for example, rely on condensers to quickly convert steam to liquid water,” said Philseok Kim, co-author of the paper and co-founder and vice president of technology at SEAS spin-off SLIPS Technologies, Inc. “This design could help speed up that process and even allow for operation at a higher temperature, significantly improving the overall energy efficiency.”

The major challenges in harvesting atmospheric water are controlling the size of the droplets, speed in which they form and the direction in which they flow.

For years, researchers focused on the hybrid chemistry of the beetle’s bumps — a hydrophilic top with hydrophobic surroundings — to explain how the beetle attracted water. However, Aizenberg and her team took inspiration from a different possibility – that convex bumps themselves also might be able to harvest water.

“We experimentally found that the geometry of bumps alone could facilitate condensation,” said Kyoo-Chul Park, a postdoctoral researcher and the first author of the paper. “By optimizing that bump shape through detailed theoretical modeling and combining it with the asymmetry of cactus spines and the nearly friction-free coatings of pitcher plants, we were able to design a material that can collect and transport a greater volume of water in a short time compared to other surfaces.”

“Without one of those parameters, the whole system would not work synergistically to promote both the growth and accelerated directional transport of even small, fast condensing droplets,” said Park.

“This research is an exciting first step towards developing a passive system that can efficiently collect water and guide it to a reservoir,” said Kim.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Condensation on slippery asymmetric bumps by Kyoo-Chul Park, Philseok Kim, Alison Grinthal, Neil He, David Fox, James C. Weaver, & Joanna Aizenberg. Nature (2016) doi:10.1038/nature16956 Published online 24 February 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.

I have featured the Namib beetle and its water harvesting capabilities most recently in a July 29, 2014 posting and the most recent story I have about SLIPS is in an Oct. 14, 2014 posting.

A bioinspired approach to self-healing materials

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Scientists have been working to develop self-healing materials for a while now and a Jan. 8, 2016 news item on Nanowerk chronicles a relatively recent attempt,

Inspired by healing wounds in skin, a new approach protects and heals surfaces using a fluid secretion process. In response to damage, dispersed liquid-storage droplets are controllably secreted. The stored liquid replenishes the surface and completes the repair of the polymer in seconds to hours …

The fluid secretion approach to repair the material has also been demonstrated in fibers and microbeads. This bioinspired approach could be extended to create highly desired adaptive, resilient materials with possible uses in heat transfer, humidity control, slippery surfaces, and fluid delivery.

A December ??, 2015 US Department of Energy (DOE) news release, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

A polymer that secretes stored liquid in response to damage has been designed and created to function as a self-healing material. While human-made material systems can trigger the release of stored contents, the ability to continuously self-adjust and monitor liquid supply in these compartments is a challenge. In contrast, biological systems manage complex protection and healing functions by having individual components work in concert to initiate and self-regulate a coordinated response. Inspired by biological wound-healing, this new process, developed by researchers at Harvard University, involves trapping and dispersing liquid-storage droplets within a reversibly crosslinked polymer gel network topped with a thin liquid overlayer. This novel approach allows storage of the liquid, yet is reconfigurable to induce finely controlled secretion in response to polymer damage. When the gel was damaged by slicing, the ruptured droplets in the immediate vicinity of the damage released oil and the gel network was squeezed. This squeezing allowed oil to be pushed out from neighboring droplets and the polymer network linkages to unzip and rezip rapidly, allowing just enough oil to flow to the damaged region. Healing occurred at ambient temperature within seconds to hours as fluid was secreted into the crack, severed polymer ends diffused across the gap, and new network linkages were created. Droplet-embedded polymers repaired faster or at lower temperatures than polymers without oil droplets. Also, the repaired droplet-embedded materials were much stronger than the repaired networks that did not contain the droplets. This dynamic liquid exchange to repair the material has also been demonstrated in other forms, showing the potential to extend this bioinspired approach for fabricating highly desired adaptive, resilient materials to a wide range of polymeric structures.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Dynamic polymer systems with self-regulated secretion for the control of surface properties and material healing by Jiaxi Cui, Daniel Daniel, Alison Grinthal, Kaixiang Lin, & Joanna Aizenberg. Nature Materials 14,  790–795 (2015) doi:10.1038/nmat4325 Published online 22 June 2015

I’m not sure what occasioned a late push to promote this particular piece of research but if you are interested, the paper is behind a paywall.

Venus’* flower basket sea sponge has strength

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Despite being made essentially of glass, the skeleton of the sea sponge known as Venus' flower basket is remarkably strong -- right down to the tiny, hair-like fibers that hold the creatures to the sea floor. Researchers from Brown University have shown that those fibers, called spicules, have an intricate internal structure that is fine-tuned to boost strength. The findings could inform the engineering of human-made materials. Credit: Kesari Lab / Brown University

Despite being made essentially of glass, the skeleton of the sea sponge known as Venus’ flower basket is remarkably strong — right down to the tiny, hair-like fibers that hold the creatures to the sea floor. Researchers from Brown University have shown that those fibers, called spicules, have an intricate internal structure that is fine-tuned to boost strength. The findings could inform the engineering of human-made materials.
Credit: Kesari Lab / Brown University

I’m not sure how anyone saw a flower basket in that sponge but I bow to a more poetic soul. In any event, scientists at Brown University (US) have shown that this sponge has unexpected strength according to an April 6, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily,

Life may seem precarious for the sea sponge known as Venus’ flower basket. Tiny, hair-like appendages made essentially of glass are all that hold the creatures to their seafloor homes. But fear not for these creatures of the deep. Those tiny lifelines, called basalia spicules, are fine-tuned for strength, according to new research led by Brown University engineers.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers show that the secret to spicules’ strength lies in their remarkable internal structure. The spicules, each only 50 microns in diameter, are made of a silica (glass) core surrounded by 10 to 50 concentric cylinders of glass, each separated by an ultra-thin layer of an organic material. The walls of each cylinder gradually decrease in thickness moving from the core toward the outside edge of the spicule.

An April 6, 2015 Brown University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the research in more detail,

When Haneesh Kesari, assistant professor of engineering at Brown, first saw this structure, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. But the pattern of decreasing thickness caught his eye.

“It was not at all clear to me what this pattern was for, but it looked like a figure from a math book,” Kesari said. “It had such mathematical regularity to it that I thought it had to be for something useful and important to the animal.”

The lives of these sponges depend on their ability to stay fixed to the sea floor. They sustain themselves by filtering nutrients out of the water, which they cannot do if they’re being cast about with the flow. So it would make sense, Kesari thought, that natural selection may have molded the creatures’ spicule anchors into models of strength — and the thickness pattern could be a contributing factor.

“If it can’t anchor, it can’t survive,” Kesari said. “So we thought this internal structure must be contributing to these spicules being a better anchor.”

To find out, Kesari worked with graduate student Michael Monn to build a mathematical model of the spicules’ structure. Among the model’s assumptions was that the organic layers between the glass cylinders allowed the cylinders to slide against each other.

“We prepared a mechanical model of this system and asked the question: Of all possible ways the thicknesses of the layers can vary, how should they vary so that the spicule’s anchoring ability is maximized?” Kesari said.

The model predicted that the structure’s load capacity would be greatest when the layers decrease in thickness toward the outside, just as was initially observed in actual spicules. Kesari and Monn then worked with James Weaver and Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, who have worked with this sponge species for years. The team carefully compared the layer thicknesses predicted by the mechanics model to the actual layer thicknesses in more than a hundred spicule samples from sponges.

The work showed that the predictions made by the model matched very closely with the observed layer thicknesses in the samples. “It appears that the arrangement and thicknesses of these layers does indeed contribute to the spicules’ strength, which helps make them better anchors,” Kesari said.

The researchers say this is the first time to their knowledge that anyone has evaluated the mechanical advantage of this particular arrangement of layers. It could add to the list of useful engineered structures inspired by nature.

“In the engineered world, you see all kinds of instances where the external geometry of a structure is modified to enhance its specific strength — I-beams are one example,” Monn said. “But you don’t see a huge effort focused toward the internal mechanical design of these structures.”

This study, however, suggests that sponge spicules could provide a blueprint for load-bearing beams made stronger from the inside out.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

New functional insights into the internal architecture of the laminated anchor spicules of Euplectella aspergillum by Michael A. Monn, James C. Weaver, Tianyang Zhang, Joanna Aizenberg, and Haneesh Kesari. Published online before print April 6, 2015, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1415502112 PNAS April 6, 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.

*’A Venus flower basket sea sponge’ corrected to ‘Venus’ flower basket sea sponge’ on Jan. 5, 2017

Blue-striped limpets and their nanophotonic features

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This is a structural colour story limpets and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. For the impatient here’s a video summary of the work courtesy of the researchers,

A Feb. 26, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily reiterates the details for those who like to read their science,

The blue-rayed limpet is a tiny mollusk that lives in kelp beds along the coasts of Norway, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and the Canary Islands. These diminutive organisms — as small as a fingernail — might escape notice entirely, if not for a very conspicuous feature: bright blue dotted lines that run in parallel along the length of their translucent shells. Depending on the angle at which light hits, a limpet’s shell can flash brilliantly even in murky water.

Now scientists at MIT and Harvard University have identified two optical structures within the limpet’s shell that give its blue-striped appearance. The structures are configured to reflect blue light while absorbing all other wavelengths of incoming light. The researchers speculate that such patterning may have evolved to protect the limpet, as the blue lines resemble the color displays on the shells of more poisonous soft-bodied snails.

A Feb. 26, 2015 MIT news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, explains why this discovery is special,

The findings, reported this week in the journal Nature Communications, represent the first evidence of an organism using mineralized structural components to produce optical displays. While birds, butterflies, and beetles can display brilliant blues, among other colors, they do so with organic structures, such as feathers, scales, and plates. The limpet, by contrast, produces its blue stripes through an interplay of inorganic, mineral structures, arranged in such a way as to reflect only blue light.

The researchers say such natural optical structures may serve as a design guide for engineering color-selective, controllable, transparent displays that require no internal light source and could be incorporated into windows and glasses.

“Let’s imagine a window surface in a car where you obviously want to see the outside world as you’re driving, but where you also can overlay the real world with an augmented reality that could involve projecting a map and other useful information on the world that exists on the other side of the windshield,” says co-author Mathias Kolle, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “We believe that the limpet’s approach to displaying color patterns in a translucent shell could serve as a starting point for developing such displays.”

The news release then reveals how this research came about,

Kolle, whose research is focused on engineering bioinspired, optical materials — including color-changing, deformable fibers — started looking into the optical features of the limpet when his brother Stefan, a marine biologist now working at Harvard, brought Kolle a few of the organisms in a small container. Stefan Kolle was struck by the mollusk’s brilliant patterning, and recruited his brother, along with several others, to delve deeper into the limpet shell’s optical properties.

To do this, the team of researchers — which also included Ling Li and Christine Ortiz at MIT and James Weaver and Joanna Aizenberg at Harvard — performed a detailed structural and optical analysis of the limpet shells. They observed that the blue stripes first appear in juveniles, resembling dashed lines. The stripes grow more continuous as a limpet matures, and their shade varies from individual to individual, ranging from deep blue to turquoise.

The researchers scanned the surface of a limpet’s shell using scanning electron microscopy, and found no structural differences in areas with and without the stripes — an observation that led them to think that perhaps the stripes arose from features embedded deeper in the shell.

To get a picture of what lay beneath, the researchers used a combination of high-resolution 2-D and 3-D structural analysis to reveal the 3-D nanoarchitecture of the photonic structures embedded in the limpets’ translucent shells.

What they found was revealing: In the regions with blue stripes, the shells’ top and bottom layers were relatively uniform, with dense stacks of calcium carbonate platelets and thin organic layers, similar to the shell structure of other mollusks. However, about 30 microns beneath the shell surface the researchers noted a stark difference. In these regions, the researchers found that the regular plates of calcium carbonate morphed into two distinct structural features: a multilayered structure with regular spacing between calcium carbonate layers resembling a zigzag pattern, and beneath this, a layer of randomly dispersed, spherical particles.

The researchers measured the dimensions of the zigzagging plates, and found the spacing between them was much wider than the more uniform plates running through the shell’s unstriped sections. They then examined the potential optical roles of both the multilayer zigzagging structure and the spherical particles.

Kolle and his colleagues used optical microscopy, spectroscopy, and diffraction microscopy to quantify the blue stripe’s light-reflection properties. They then measured the zigzagging structures and their angle with respect to the shell surface, and determined that this structure is optimized to reflect blue and green light.

The researchers also determined that the disordered arrangement of spherical particles beneath the zigzag structures serves to absorb transmitted light that otherwise could de-saturate the reflected blue color.

From these results, Kolle and his team deduced that the zigzag pattern acts as a filter, reflecting only blue light. As the rest of the incoming light passes through the shell, the underlying particles absorb this light — an effect that makes a shell’s stripes appear even more brilliantly blue.

And, for those who can never get enough detail, the news release provides a bit more than the video,

The team then sought to tackle a follow-up question: What purpose do the blue stripes serve? The limpets live either concealed at the base of kelp plants, or further up in the fronds, where they are visually exposed. Those at the base grow a thicker shell with almost no stripes, while their blue-striped counterparts live higher on the plant.

Limpets generally don’t have well-developed eyes, so the researchers reasoned that the blue stripes must not serve as a communication tool, attracting one organism to another. Rather, they think that the limpet’s stripes may be a defensive mechanism: The mollusk sits largely exposed on a frond, so a plausible defense against predators may be to appear either invisible or unappetizing. The researchers determined that the latter is more likely the case, as the limpet’s blue stripes resemble the patterning of poisonous marine snails that also happen to inhabit similar kelp beds.

Kolle says the group’s work has revealed an interesting insight into the limpet’s optical properties, which may be exploited to engineer advanced transparent optical displays. The limpet, he points out, has evolved a microstructure in its shell to satisfy an optical purpose without overly compromising the shell’s mechanical integrity. Materials scientists and engineers could take inspiration from this natural balancing act.

“It’s all about multifunctional materials in nature: Every organism — no matter if it has a shell, or skin, or feathers — interacts in various ways with the environment, and the materials with which it interfaces to the outside world frequently have to fulfill multiple functions simultaneously,” Kolle says. “[Engineers] are more and more focusing on not only optimizing just one single property in a material or device, like a brighter screen or higher pixel density, but rather on satisfying several … design and performance criteria simultaneously. We can gain inspiration and insight from nature.”

Peter Vukusic, an associate professor of physics at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, says the researchers “have done an exquisite job” in uncovering the optical mechanism behind the limpet’s conspicuous appearance.

“By using multiple and complementary analysis techniques they have elucidated, in glorious detail, the many structural and physiological factors that have given rise to the optical signature of this highly evolved system,” says Vukusic, who was not involved in the study. “The animal’s complex morphology is highly interesting for photonics scientists and technologists interested in manipulating light and creating specialized appearances.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

A highly conspicuous mineralized composite photonic architecture in the translucent shell of the blue-rayed limpet by Ling Li, Stefan Kolle, James C. Weaver, Christine Ortiz, Joanna Aizenberg & Mathias Kolle. Nature Communications 6, Article number: 6322 doi:10.1038/ncomms7322 Published 26 February 2015

This article is open access.

SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) technology repels blood and bacteria from medical devices

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Researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed a coating for medical devices that helps to address some of these devices’ most  troublesome aspects. From an Oct. 12, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

From joint replacements to cardiac implants and dialysis machines, medical devices enhance or save lives on a daily basis. However, any device implanted in the body or in contact with flowing blood faces two critical challenges that can threaten the life of the patient the device is meant to help: blood clotting and bacterial infection.

A team of Harvard scientists and engineers may have a solution. They developed a new surface coating for medical devices using materials already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The coating repelled blood from more than 20 medically relevant substrates the team tested — made of plastic to glass and metal — and also suppressed biofilm formation in a study reported in Nature Biotechnology. But that’s not all.

The team implanted medical-grade tubing and catheters coated with the material in large blood vessels in pigs, and it prevented blood from clotting for at least eight hours without the use of blood thinners such as heparin. Heparin is notorious for causing potentially lethal side-effects like excessive bleeding but is often a necessary evil in medical treatments where clotting is a risk.

“Devising a way to prevent blood clotting without using anticoagulants is one of the holy grails in medicine,” said Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Founding Director of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and senior author of the study. Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as professor of bioengineering at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

An Oct. 12, 2014 Wyss Institute news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the inspiration for this work,

The idea for the coating evolved from SLIPS, a pioneering surface technology developed by coauthor Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., who is a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard SEAS. SLIPS stands for Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces. Inspired by the slippery surface of the carnivorous pitcher plant, which enables the plant to capture insects, SLIPS repels nearly any material it contacts. The liquid layer on the surface provides a barrier to everything from ice to crude oil and blood.

“Traditional SLIPS uses porous, textured surface substrates to immobilize the liquid layer whereas medical surfaces are mostly flat and smooth – so we further adapted our approach by capitalizing on the natural roughness of chemically modified surfaces of medical devices,” said Aizenberg, who leads the Wyss Institute’s Adaptive Materials platform. “This is yet another incarnation of the highly customizable SLIPS platform that can be designed to create slippery, non-adhesive surfaces on any material.”

The Wyss team developed a super-repellent coating that can be adhered to existing, approved medical devices. In a two-step surface-coating process, they chemically attached a monolayer of perfluorocarbon, which is similar to Teflon. Then they added a layer of liquid perfluorocarbon, which is widely used in medicine for applications such as liquid ventilation for infants with breathing challenges, blood substitution, eye surgery, and more. The team calls the tethered perfluorocarbon plus the liquid layer a Tethered-Liquid Perfluorocarbon surface, or TLP for short.

In addition to working seamlessly when coated on more than 20 different medical surfaces and lasting for more than eight hours to prevent clots in a pig under relatively high blood flow rates without the use of heparin, the TLP coating achieved the following results:

  • TLP-treated medical tubing was stored for more than a year under normal temperature and humidity conditions and still prevented clot formation
  • The TLP surface remained stable under the full range of clinically relevant physiological shear stresses, or rates of blood flow seen in catheters and central lines, all the way up to dialysis machines
  • It repelled the components of blood that cause clotting (fibrin and platelets)
  • When bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa were grown in TLP-coated medical tubing for more than six weeks, less than one in a billion bacteria were able to adhere. Central lines coated with TLP significantly reduce sepsis from Central-Line Mediated Bloodstream Infections (CLABSI). (Sepsis is a life-threatening blood infection caused by bacteria, and a significant risk for patients with implanted medical devices.)

Out of sheer curiosity, the researchers even tested a TLP-coated surface with a gecko – the superstar of sticking whose footpads contain many thousands of hairlike structures with tremendous adhesive strength. The gecko was unable to hold on.

“We were wonderfully surprised by how well the TLP coating worked, particularly in vivo without heparin,” said one of the co-lead authors, Anna Waterhouse, Ph.D., a Wyss Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. “Usually the blood will start to clot within an hour in the extracorporeal circuit, so our experiments really demonstrate the clinical relevance of this new coating.”

While most of the team’s demonstrations were performed on medical devices such as catheters and perfusion tubing using relatively simple setups, they say there is a lot more on the horizon.

“We feel this is just the beginning of how we might test this for use in the clinic,” said co-lead author Daniel Leslie, Ph.D., a Wyss Institute Staff Scientist, who aims to test it on more complex systems such as dialysis machines and ECMO, a machine used in the intensive care unit to help critically ill patients breathe.

I first featured SLIPS technology in a Jan. 15, 2014 post about its possible use for stain-free, self-cleaning clothing. This Wyss Institute video about the latest work featuring the use of  SLIPS technology in medical devices also describes its possible use in pipelines and airplanes,

You can find research paper with this link,

A bioinspired omniphobic surface coating on medical devices prevents thrombosis and biofouling by Daniel C Leslie, Anna Waterhouse, Julia B Berthet, Thomas M Valentin, Alexander L Watters, Abhishek Jain, Philseok Kim, Benjamin D Hatton, Arthur Nedder, Kathryn Donovan, Elana H Super, Caitlin Howell, Christopher P Johnson, Thy L Vu, Dana E Bolgen, Sami Rifai, Anne R Hansen, Michael Aizenberg, Michael Super, Joanna Aizenberg, & Donald E Ingber. Nature Biotechnology (2014) doi:10.1038/nbt.3020 Published online 12 October 2014

This paper is behind a paywall but there is a free preview available via ReadCube Access.

Mesenchymal condensation (a process embryos use to begin forming a variety of organs, including teeth, cartilage, bone, muscle, tendon, and kidney) for complex 3D tissue engineering

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It seems that there are three strategies for creating complex 3D tissues and until now scientists have used only two of the three. From a March 5, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

A bit of pressure from a new shrinking, sponge-like gel is all it takes to turn transplanted unspecialized cells into cells that lay down minerals and begin to form teeth.

The bioinspired gel material could one day help repair or replace damaged organs, such as teeth and bone, and possibly other organs as well, scientists from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Boston Children’s Hospital report recently in Advanced Materials.

“Tissue engineers have long raised the idea of using synthetic materials to mimic the inductive power of the embryo,” said Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Founding Director of the Wyss Institute, …, Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS, and senior author of the study. “We’re excited about this work because it shows that it really is possible.”

The March 5, 2014 Wyss Institute news release, which originated the news item, delves into the nature of the research,

Embryonic tissues have the power to drive cells and tissues to specialize and form organs. To do that, they employ biomolecules called growth factors to stimulate growth; gene-activating chemicals that cause the cells to specialize, and mechanical forces that modulate cell responses to these other factors.

But so far tissue engineers who want to build organs in the laboratory have employed only two of the three strategies — growth factors and gene-activating chemicals. Perhaps as a result, they have not yet succeeded in producing complex three-dimensional tissues.

A few years ago, Ingber and Tadanori Mammoto, M.D., Ph.D., Instructor in Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, investigated a process called mesenchymal condensation that embryos use to begin forming a variety of organs, including teeth, cartilage, bone, muscle, tendon, and kidney.

In mesenchymal condensation, two adjacent tissue layers — loosely packed connective-tissue cells called mesenchyme and sheet-like tissue called an epithelium that covers it — exchange biochemical signals. This exchange causes the mesenchymal cells to squeeze themselves tightly into a small knot directly below where the new organ will form.

Here’s a video from the Wyss Institute illustrating the squeezing process,

When the temperature rises to just below body temperature, this biocompatible gel shrinks dramatically within minutes, bringing tooth-precursor cells (green) closer together. Credit: Basma Hashmi

Getting back to the research (from the news release),

By examining tissues isolated from the jaws of embryonic mice, Mammoto and Ingber showed that when the compressed mesenchymal cells turn on genes that stimulate them to generate whole teeth composed of mineralized tissues, including dentin and enamel.

Inspired by this embryonic induction mechanism, Ingber and Basma Hashmi, a Ph.D. candidate at SEAS who is the lead author of the current paper, set out to develop a way to engineer artificial teeth by creating a tissue-friendly material that accomplishes the same goal. Specifically, they wanted a porous sponge-like gel that could be impregnated with mesenchymal cells, then, when implanted into the body, induced to shrink in 3D to physically compact the cells inside it.

To develop such a material, Ingber and Hashmi teamed up with researchers led by Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member who leads the Institute’s Adaptive Materials Technologies platform. Aizenberg is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University.

They chemically modified a special gel-forming polymer called PNIPAAm that scientists have used to deliver drugs to the body’s tissues. PNIPAAm gels have an unusual property: they contract abruptly when they warm.

But they do this at a lukewarm temperature, whereas the researchers wanted them to shrink specifically at 37°C — body temperature — so that they’d squeeze their contents as soon as they were injected into the body. Hashmi worked with Lauren Zarzar, Ph.D., a former SEAS graduate student who’s now a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for more than a year, modifying PNIPAAm and testing the resulting materials. Ultimately, they developed a polymer that forms a tissue-friendly gel with two key properties: cells stick to it, and it compresses abruptly when warmed to body temperature.

As an initial test, Hashmi implanted mesenchymal cells in the gel and warmed it in the lab. Sure enough, when the temperature reached 37°C, the gel shrank within 15 minutes, causing the cells inside the gel to round up, shrink, and pack tightly together.

“The reason that’s cool is that the cells are alive,” Hashmi said. “Usually when this happens, cells are dead or dying.”

Not only were they alive — they activated three genes that drive tooth formation.

To see if the shrinking gel also worked its magic in the body, Hashmi worked with Mammoto to load mesenchymal cells into the gel, then implant the gel beneath the mouse kidney capsule — a tissue that is well supplied with blood and often used for transplantation experiments.

The implanted cells not only expressed tooth-development genes — they laid down calcium and minerals, just as mesenchymal cells do in the body as they begin to form teeth.

“They were in full-throttle tooth-development mode,” Hashmi said.

The researchers have future plans (from the news release),

In the embryo, mesenchymal cells can’t build teeth alone — they need to be combined with cells that form the epithelium. In the future, the scientists plan to test whether the shrinking gel can stimulate both tissues to generate an entire functional tooth.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper about the successful attempt to stimulate mesenchymal cells into the beginnings of tooth formation,

Developmentally-Inspired Shrink-Wrap Polymers for Mechanical Induction of Tissue Differentiation by Basma Hashmi, Lauren D. Zarzar, Tadanori Mammoto, Akiko Mammoto, Amanda Jiang, Joanna Aizenberg, and Donald E. Ingber. Advanced Materials Article first published online: 18 FEB 2014 DOI: 10.1002/adma.201304995

© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) lead the way to stain-free, self-cleaning clothes

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Thanks to the researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, I have discovered a new word, omniphobicity. Before getting to this new word, here’s a little more information about the project which spawned the word. According to a Jan. 14, 2014 news item on Nanowerk,

The researchers behind SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) have demonstrated a spate of sleek applications of the super-slick coating since unveiling it in a 2011 issue of Nature – and they just expanded its repertoire even more.

The Jan. ??, 2014 Harvard University Wyss Institute news release, which originated the news item, provides additional information about the SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) technology explaining the engineers have taken their inspiration from the pitcher plant rather the lotus, as is more common,

The team from Harvard’s Wyss Institute and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has demonstrated the uncanny ability of SLIPS – inspired by the pitcher plant – to repel nearly any material it contacts: water, ice, oil, saltwater, wax, blood, and more. They have demonstrated its versatility under extreme conditions of pH and temperature, and have successfully used SLIPS to coat everything from refrigeration coils to lenses, windows, and ceramics. What’s more, in 2012 they won an R&D 100 Award for the technology from R&D Magazine. This annual award honors the year’s 100 most significant products, the so-called game-changers of the technology scene.

Here’s what an image illustrating the pitcher plant and SLIPS,

Inspired by the Nepenthes pitcher plant... [Image credit: New Scientist; Bohn & Federie, PNAS 101, 14138-14143, 2004] Courtesy Wyss Institute

Inspired by the Nepenthes pitcher plant… [Image credit: New Scientist; Bohn & Federie, PNAS 101, 14138-14143, 2004] Courtesy Wyss Institute

The team’s latest work features cotton and polyster fabrics (from the news release),

And now, as reported January 10 [2014] in a special issue celebrating the 25th year of the journal Nanotechnology, the team has modified everyday cotton and polyester fabrics to exhibit traditional antifouling SLIPS behavior. The advance could meet the need for a robust, stain-resistant textile for a host of consumer and industrial applications.

“We took one page out of Nature’s book, and are finding that it has the potential to help us develop solutions to a variety of age-old challenges: ice we don’t want on refrigeration coils, bacteria that we don’t want on medical devices, and now stains we don’t want on clothes,” said Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., who leads the development of the technology. Aizenberg is a Core Faculty member of the Wyss Institute and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS

Most currently available state-of-the-art, stain-resistant fabrics draw their inspiration and design from the lotus leaf. Tiny nanotextures on the surface of lotus leaves resist water, causing droplets of water to bead up on a cushion of air at the edge of the surface. Lotus-inspired textiles therefore use air-filled nanostructures to repel water. These are capable of repelling most aqueous liquids and dirt particles, but they suffer from a series of shortcomings, explained Cicely Shillingford, a Wyss Research Assistant and lead author of the Nanotechnology publication. They require a stable solid-air layer for the beading process to occur and thus fail easily under pressure – as in a heavy rainstorm – and do not withstand physical damage, such as twisting and abrasion, very well. They also stain more easily from organic or complex liquids, such as oil.

On the other hand, SLIPS is inspired by the carnivorous pitcher plant, which locks in a water layer to create a slick coating that causes insects that land on it to literally hydroplane and fall into the plant. The SLIPS coating anchors a slippery lubricated film infused to a nanoporous solid surface, creating a material that performs exceedingly well under pressure or physical damage, and can resist all kinds of liquids, including oil.
To create a fabric with SLIPS-type functionality, the team bought off-the-shelf cotton and polyester fabrics from stores near their lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and developed two ways to chemically treat them. One involved coating them with tiny particles of silica (SiM), and the other required a treatment with sol-gel based alumina (SgB). …

What happened after the team put the SLIPS-fabrics through a ringer of tests performed according to industrial standards – from twisting to rubbing and staining attempts?

“The SLIPS-fabric showed an unprecedented ability to repel a wide range of fluids and resist staining, and it handles physical stresses and strains just fine,” said Aizenberg.

While not every SLIPS-fabric was as breathable (yet) as the researchers hoped, it outperformed currently available stain-resistant fabrics on just about every other measure. As such, the most likely immediate applications could be fabrics needed in potentially extreme environments where breathability is not paramount but exposure to challenging contaminating liquids and biological hazards is involved, such as tactical suits for the military, lab coats, medical clothing, specialty garments for construction and manufacturing, and perhaps even tents and sports stadiums.

The scientists have also provided an image of a lab coat that was partially (sleeves) converted to SLIPS and than stained with a variety of foodstuffs,

Former Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow Tak-Sing Wong, Ph.D., who is now an assistant professor at The Pennsylvania State University, wears a labcoat in which the sleeves were converted to SLIPS, after sprayed with wine, tomato juice, eggs, and more. Courtesy Wyss Institute

Former Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow Tak-Sing Wong, Ph.D., who is now an assistant professor at The Pennsylvania State University, wears a labcoat in which the sleeves were converted to SLIPS, after sprayed with wine, tomato juice, eggs, and more. Courtesy Wyss Institute

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Fabrics coated with lubricated nanostructures display robust omniphobicity by Cicely Shillingford, Noah MacCallum, Tak-Sing Wong, Philseok Kim and Joanna Aizenberg. Nanotechnology 25 01 4019 doi:10.1088/0957-4484/25/1/014019

This paper is behind a paywall. As for an explanation of the word omniphobicity this abstract is helpful,

The development of a stain-resistant and pressure-stable textile is desirable for consumer and industrial applications alike, yet it remains a challenge that current technologies have been unable to fully address. Traditional superhydrophobic surfaces, inspired by the lotus plant, are characterized by two main components: hydrophobic chemical functionalization and surface roughness. While this approach produces water-resistant surfaces, these materials have critical weaknesses that hinder their practical utility, in particular as robust stain-free fabrics. For example, traditional superhydrophobic surfaces fail (i.e., become stained) when exposed to low-surface-tension liquids, under pressure when impacted by a high-velocity stream of water (e.g., rain), and when exposed to physical forces such as abrasion and twisting. We have recently introduced slippery lubricant-infused porous surfaces (SLIPS), a self-healing, pressure-tolerant and omniphobic surface, to address these issues. [emphasis mine] Herein we present the rational design and optimization of nanostructured lubricant-infused fabrics and demonstrate markedly improved performance over traditional superhydrophobic textile treatments: SLIPS-functionalized cotton and polyester fabrics exhibit decreased contact angle hysteresis and sliding angles, omni-repellent properties against various fluids including polar and nonpolar liquids, pressure tolerance and mechanical robustness, all of which are not readily achievable with the state-of-the-art superhydrophobic coatings.

If I understand it rightly the researchers are using the word omniphobic (omni meaning ‘all’ or ‘everything’) to imply that this surface repels liquids in many more situations, e.g. high-velocity stream of water (rain) than the superhydrophobic materials.