Novel Biobased Cyclic Peptide Glass: A New Breakthrough in Medical Materials and Smart Devices

Researcher Yan Xuehai and his team from the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have developed a new type of high-entropy non-covalent cyclic peptide glass. This glass exhibits excellent enzyme tolerance, anti-crystallization, and mechanical properties, providing technical support for the development of bio-based medical materials and smart functional devices.

Cyclic peptides are bio-molecular building blocks with rigid backbone structures and high stability, making them ideal materials for constructing new types of bio-molecular non-covalent glasses. However, cyclic peptides are prone to crystallization and difficult to form into glass. The team employed a high-entropy strategy, melting multiple cyclic peptide molecules to create a high-entropy environment, and with the help of quenching technology, maintained multi-scale disordered conformations in the supercooled liquid, effectively inhibiting crystallization and promoting glass formation.

This new type of glass can not only integrate other functional components such as organic small molecules and nanoparticles but also degrade under the action of biological enzymes into environmentally harmless substances, enabling ecological recycling.

Yan Xuehai stated that although the research used cyclic peptide molecules as a model, the experimental methods and glass formation mechanisms are equally applicable to other organic molecular systems. He hopes these findings will inspire more research into non-covalent glasses and promote their application in the fields of biomedicine and smart devices.

The team is currently researching glass-state drugs and optoelectronic devices related to biological interfaces, and plans to use AI technology to accelerate the development of new bio-based glass materials. Yan Xuehai believes that bio-molecular glasses based on non-covalent bonds have unique biodegradable and recyclable characteristics, offering a new solution to the high energy consumption and pollution problems associated with glass and plastic materials.