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Updated: May 19, 2026

Biomimetic Materials to Characterize Bacteria-host Interactions
Published on: November 16, 2015
Engineering mechanosensitive multivalent receptor-ligand interactions: why the nanolinker regions of bacterial
Samuel Hertig1, Mamta Chabria, Viola Vogel
1Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, CH-8093, Zürich, Switzerland.
Abstract:
Inspired by bacterial adhesins, we present a promising strategy of how to engineer peptides to probe various mechanical strains of extracellular matrix fibers. Functional sequence alignment of bacterial adhesins reveals that the bacterial linkers connecting the multivalent binding motifs recognizing fibronectin show considerable heterogeneity in length. Their length regulates the tunable affinities for fibronectin fibrils when stretched into different mechanical strain states. This platform has potential applications in probing extracellular matrix fiber strains in tissues.
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