Chemists 'crystallize' new approach to materials science

A team of chemists at the University of California San Diego conducted breakthrough research for materials science—a field for which chemistry frequently provides information about the structure and composition of materials, as well as the processes for making and using them. Its aim is to create new materials—from metals and rubber to coatings and crystals.

Researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry accomplished this goal by mixing together unlikely materials to create a new hybrid form of crystalline matter that could change the practice of materials science. The findings, published in Nature, present potential benefits to medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.

Ling Zhang, Jake Bailey and Rohit Subramanian, all Ph.D. candidates studying under Professor Akif Tezcan, combined protein crystals with synthetic polymers to create the new hybrid materials.

"The chemical integration of two such disparate substances gives rise to a new form of matter that completely circumvents the fundamental limitation that ordered substances are brittle and inflexible, and flexible materials are devoid of order," explained Tezcan, who operates Tezcan Lab at UC San Diego.