IMX Colloquium - Towards life-inspired soft matter dynamics and functionalities

Biological systems have already paved several routes for bioinspired materials, e.g., for structural colours, wetting, adhesion, and mechanical properties. They have largely involved equilibrium or kinetically trapped properties. By contrast, biological systems allowing multifunctional properties are characteristically dissipatively and dynamically adaptive and incorporate homeostatic feedback mechanisms to regulate the dynamic states. They also typically use signal transduction to mediate the signal from the sensory elements to the responsive sites, unlike the classic man-made stimuli responsive materials. These concept suggest avenues towards more complex life-like functions in soft matter. Herein, optically driven hydrogel systems are presented to drive homeostatically controlled thermal oscillations and to mediate signal transduction via thermal intermediate signalling (1). On the other hand, biological magnetoreception in elasmobranch organisms involves electromagnetic induction (EMI) and suggests avenues for bioinspired electrical signal transductions.  We show magnetic profile recognition of translocated magnetically encoded soft matter objects using electrical intermediate signaling by EMI and decoding the magnetic information with machine learning (2). Combination of high stiffness and promoted dynamics for self-healing has turned challenging to combine. Self-healing hydrogels, still combining high tensile stiffness close to that of skin were shown by using polymers upon nanoconfinement in 2D-nanosheet layered confinements (3). Finally, we show trainable actuations in bilayer gel actuators (4). Ever more complex responses can be created, such as mimicking the Pavlovian classical conditioning (5), all paving ways for growingly life-like functions for soft robotics and interfacing with biology.

1.  H. Zhang, H. Zeng, A. Eklund, H. Guo, A. Priimagi, O. Ikkala, Feedback-controlled hydrogels with homeostatic oscillations and dissipative signal transduction, Nat. Nano, 17, 1303 (2022).
2.  Z. Miao, X. Hu, K. Liu, S. Hu, G. Yan, H. Tan, O. Ikkala, Z. P. Lv, B. Peng, Bioinspired sensory transduction for magnetic profile recognition and encryption, Adv. Mat. 38 e15994 (2026).
3.   C. Liang, V. Dudko, O. Khoruzhenko, X. Hong, Z.-P. Lv, J. Breu, O. Ikkala, H. Zhang, Stiff and self-healing hydrogels by polymer entanglements in co-planar nanoconfinement, Nat. Mater. 24, 599 (2025).
4.  S. Hu, Y. Fang, C. Liang, M. Turunen, O. Ikkala, H. Zhang, Thermally trainable dual network hydrogels, Nat. Commun., 14, 3717 (2023).
5. H. Zhang, H. Zeng, A. Priimagi, O. Ikkala, Programmable responsive hydrogels with classical conditioning algorithm, Nat. Commun., 10, 3267 (2019).