Researchers from Tel Aviv University have successfully produced a new type of glass which, while maintaining its transparency, is able to bond immediately upon contact with water at room temperature.
The research was published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Nature.
The research, led by PhD student Gal Finkelstein-Zuta and Prof. Ehud Gazit from the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research in the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at TAU, could change dramatically. durability and cost of tools in a variety of industries. More importantly, 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,” explained Prof. Gas. “Among other things, we study the sequences of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Amino acids and peptides have a natural tendency to bond with each other and form ordered structures with a defined periodic arrangement, but during research, we discovered a unique peptide that behaves unlike anything we know: it it did not form any ordered pattern, but an amorphous, disordered one that outlines the glass.”
How does glass work?
Liquid glass has very little order at the molecular level, but its mechanical properties remain rigid. While glass is usually produced by rapidly cooling heated materials and then freezing them in a process to crystallize the glass, TAU discovered that the aromatic peptide, which consists of a three-tyrosine sequence (YYY), forms a molecular glass spontaneously, after evaporation of an aqueous solution, under room temperature conditions.
“The commercial glass we all know is created by rapidly cooling molten materials, a process called vitrification,” said Gal Finkelstein-Zuta. “Amorphous liquid-like organization has to be fixed before it can arrange itself in a more energy-efficient way like in crystals, and that requires energy – it has to be heated to high temperatures and cooled immediately. On the other hand, the glass we discovered, which consists of biological building blocks, forms 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, we made lenses from our new glass. Instead of undergoing a lengthy grinding and polishing process, we simply drop a dot onto a surface, where we control its curvature—and thus its focus—by adjusting only the volume of the solution.
“This is the first time that someone has managed to create molecular glass under simple conditions,” said Prof. Gazit, “but no less important than that are the properties of the glass we created. It is a very special glass. On the one hand, it is very strong and on the other hand, 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 created is transparent in the deep infrared. This has many uses in fields such as satellites, remote sensing, communications and optics.
“It is also a strong adhesive, it can bond different glasses and at the same time it can repair the cracks that are created in it, it is a set of properties that does not exist in any glass in the world, which has great potential in science and engineering, and we got all of this from a single peptide—a small piece of protein.”