Designing allostery-inspired response in mechanical networks
By Jason W. Rocks, Nidhi Pashine, Irmgard Bischofberger, Carl P. Goodrich, Andrea J. Liu, Sidney R. Nagel. 2016
212 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Significance We show that removal of a small number of bonds in a random elastic network can dramatically change its mechanical response. Our theoretical approach precisely and efficiently controls the local strain at one point in such a network in response to a strain applied elsewhere in the system. The responses we create are inspired by the long-range-correlated deformations that often characterize allostery in proteins. The ubiquity of allostery in biological molecules suggests that it is relatively easy to develop through evolution. Our nearly 100% success rate in designing these responses by removing a very small fraction of bonds shows that it is similarly easy to create these types of elastic responses in disordered mechanical networks. Recent advances in designing metamaterials have demonstrated that global mechanical properties of disordered spring networks can be tuned by selectively modifying only a small subset of bonds. Here, using a computationally efficient approach, we extend this idea to tune more general properties of networks. With nearly complete success, we are able to produce a strain between any two target nodes in a network in response to an applied source strain on any other pair of nodes by removing only ∼1% of the bonds. We are also able to control multiple pairs of target nodes, each with a different individual response, from a single source, and to tune multiple independent source/target responses simultaneously into a network. We have fabricated physical networks in macroscopic 2D and 3D systems that exhibit these responses. This work is inspired by the long-range coupled conformational changes that constitute allosteric function in proteins. The fact that allostery is a common means for regulation in biological molecules suggests that it is a relatively easy property to develop through evolution. In analogy, our results show that long-range coupled mechanical responses are similarly easy to achieve in disordered networks.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry, Molecular Biology
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In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- Design of Elastic Networks with Evolutionary Optimized Long-Range Communication as Mechanical Models of Allosteric Proteins (2017, background): “After finishing the article I became aware of two quite recently appeared works, in which the design of mechanical networks with allosteric coupling had also been undertaken (46,47).”