TAU Shatters Limits with Self-Repairing Glass
TAU researchers create transparent, self-healing adhesive glass that forms in contact with water.
Researchers from TAU have created a new type of glass with unique and even contradictory properties, such as being a strong adhesive (sticky) and incredibly transparent at the same time. The glass, which forms spontaneously when in contact with water at room temperature, could revolutionize in an array of diverse industries such as optics and electro-optics, satellite communication, remote sensing, and biomedicine.
The glass has been discovered by a team of researchers from Israel and the world, led by PhD student Gal Finkelstein-Zuta and Prof. Ehud Gazit from the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at TAU. The research results were published last week in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.
"In our laboratory, we study bio-convergence and specifically use the wonderful properties of biology to produce innovative materials", explains Prof. Gazit, a 2015 Kadar Family Award recipient. "Among other things, we study sequences of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Amino acids and peptides have a natural tendency to connect and form ordered structures with a defined periodic arrangement, but during the research, we discovered a unique peptide that behaves differently from anything we know: it didn’t form any ordered pattern but an amorphous, disordered one, that describes glass".
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