Plants may have no muscles, but they can grow upwards against the strain of gravity and their roots can even shift soil and rocks – because their cells can absorb water to form strong structures. Now an artificial material which mimics this ability could help to create better soft robots and medical implants.
Shelby Hutchens and her colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign formed so-called plant tissue analogues (PTAs) by fabricating closed cells from a compound of silicon called polydimethylsiloxane, which is semi-permeable like plant cell walls.
Researchers used varying salt levels inside the cells to control how much pure water from outside was absorbed through the polydimethylsiloxane cell walls via osmosis. The higher the salt concentration, the more water was absorbed and the stiffer and larger the cells became. This had to be tuned carefully, as at very high salt concentrations the artificial cells ruptured.
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