Biocomposite hydrogels are promising for applications in wearable flexible strain sensors. Nevertheless, the existing biocomposite hydrogels are still hard to meet all requirements, which limits the practical application. Here, inspired by the structure and composition of natural ferritin, we design a PAAm-Ferritin hybrid hydrogel through a facile method. Ferritin is uniformly distributed in the cross-linking networks and acts as a nanocage spring model, leading to the enhanced tensile strength of the hydrogel. The fracture stress is 99 kPa at 1400% maximum elongation. As fabricated PAAm-Ferritin hybrid hydrogels exhibit high toughness and low elastic modulus (21 kPa). The PAAm-Ferritin hybrid hydrogels present excellent biocompatibility and increased conductivity compared with PAAm hydrogel. Impressively, as a wearable flexible strain sensor, the PAAm-Ferritin hybrid hydrogels have high sensitivity (gauge factor = 2.06), excellent reliability, and cycling stability. This study indicates the feasibility of utilizing ferritin to synthesize functional materials, which is conducive to expanding the use of protein synthesis of materials technology and application fields.
Keywords: ferritin; flexible; nanocage; polyacrylamide hydrogel; strain sensor.