Gel inspired by nature explains why this duck is stuck
Today, this material can seal the pipes and brave the ocean. But one day it could be used in surgery or underwater repairs
A rubber duck glued to a rock by the sea using one of the researchers’ hydrogels.
Fan Hailong and Hongguang Liao
On the banks of a beach in northern Japan, the waves strike a rubber duck glued with a rock. Thanks to a new supersticized hydrogel that lines its base, the toy will not move.
Hydrogels are soft and jelly materials used in many fields. In medicine, they can dress injuries and deliver medication. In agriculture, they can help the soil hold more water. But making the substances sticky is difficult and underwater, it is even more difficult. The glues generally do not hold well under a humid and salty surfing.
The researchers have plastered a new Superadhesive hydrogel on the basis of a rubber duck and supported it on a rock by the ocean. Duck can stick their years for years, say the researchers.
However, nature has a solution. Creatures such as Bernacles and Moules naturally produce proteins that allow them to stay in damp surfaces. Inspired by these adhesive capacities, researchers have combed through catalogs protein structures of these animals to imitate their most sticky characteristics. Then scientists incorporated these protein structures into the hydrogels and tested them. After having carried out several experiences, the team fed the results to an automatic learning system so that it can design a hydrogel with an even stronger glue. The system has proposed three superadhesive conceptions, made up of different protein structures, which researchers have described this week Nature.
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Jonathan Barnes, a polymer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study, was impressed by the force of improved hydrogels. In an experience, the researchers used one of the gels to stick pairs of plates made from one of the three different materials – meramic, glass and titanium – in a saline solution reservoir. Each glued pair had a mass load kilogram suspended below. The frost maintained more than a year. “To last a year, it’s incredible,” says Barnes.
The researchers analyzed the amino acid sequences of the natural protein glues used by organisms to adhere to wet surfaces. They identified characteristic sequence patterns which were then used to shed light on the design of adhesive hydrogels, with the automatic learning used to optimize the conceptions. The authors have thus identified superadhesive hydrogels which work well underwater and which could have applications in surgery and tissue regeneration and as materials to be used on ships and offshore structures.
Nature; Source: “Novo design focused on super-adhesive hydrogel data”, by Hongguang Liao et al., In nature, vol. 644; August 7, 2025 (reference)
The three hydrogels designed by artificial intelligence showed a similar force in artificial seawater. But one has surpassed the others when tested in desionized water, which is devoid of load and is not in nature. Resistance differences show that certain adhesive materials can be more equipped for specific environments than others. “We are now working to settle this difference and test them in different conditions,” explains the co-author of the study, Jian Ping Gong, Polymer scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan. “We also want to improve and [find] Other formulations that can work on metal, for example. »»
After synthesizing ultrasticky gels, scientists took two of them in the field to test their real world capacities. The researchers used a gel to seal a hole at the base of a hose three meters long which was filled with tap water to simulate a high pressure water leak. And they used the other to affix a rubber duck on a rock to see how well the technology behaved well in sea water. One day, these gels could help researchers develop artificial skin or repair structures underwater and offshore.
“”[The study] Comb more difficult, faster and more reliable wet adhesives – for medical sealing, sea infrastructure and emergency repairs, “said Ximin He, a scientist of materials that studies biological inspiration materials at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was not involved in the document.
