Self-healing hydrogels

Biocompatible material

Nanotechnology

Polymer chemistry

Control reconfiguration

Engineering

Biomedical engineering

Embedded system

Composite material

Disulfide bond

Eutectic system

Chemistry

Metallurgy

Materials science

Biocompatibility

Alloy

Computer science

Polymer

Biochemistry

Protein adsorption

Nature Communications

Designing electronic skin (e-skin) with proteins is a critical way to endow e-skin with biocompatibility, but engineering protein structures to achieve controllable mechanical properties and self-healing ability remains a challenge. Here, we develop a hybrid gluten network through the incorporation of a eutectic gallium indium alloy (EGaIn) to design a self-healable e-skin with improved mechanical properties. The intrinsic reversible disulfide bond/sulfhydryl group reconfiguration of gluten networks is explored as a driving force to introduce EGaIn as a chemical cross-linker, thus inducing secondary structure rearrangement of gluten to form additional β-sheets as physical cross-linkers. Remarkably, the obtained gluten-based material is self-healing, achieves synthetic material-like stretchability (&gt;1600%) and possesses the ability to promote skin cell proliferation. The final e-skin is biocompatible and biodegradable and can sense strain changes from human motions of different scales. The protein network microregulation method paves the way for future skin-like protein-based e-skin.

Liquid metal-tailored gluten network for protein-based e-skin