19.01.2022 - Frauke Graeter "Stressed soft matter: How tendons handle tension and free electrons"
| When |
Jan 19, 2022
from 04:00 PM to 05:15 PM |
|---|---|
| Contact Name | Simone Ortolf |
| Contact Phone | 203 97666 |
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Stressed soft matter: How tendons handle tension and free electrons
Polymers subjected to mechanical stress - be it a shoe sole or rubber band - generate mechanoradicals by undergoing bond scission, a fact known for a century and harnessed technologically. We uncovered, using electron-paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, the very same mechanism to be at play in tendon collagen, the major force-carrying protein material of our body. We have developed and use hybrid Monte Carlo / Molecular Dynamics simulations to model the complex chemical processes in classical simulations on the fly, and predict the formation and fate of radicals within stretched collagen to interpret the experiments. I will also show how we more recently employ graph-based Machine Learning techniques to estimate involved reaction barriers from pre-computed quantum chemical data.
Our results show how collagen has been designed by evolution not only to carry but also to sense high mechanical loads through mechanically generated radicals.
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