Ion Conduction across Multi-functional Glycoprotein-Based Free-Standing Film
Current studies concerning conductive polymeric materials are leaning more towards environmentally friendly and naturally abundant resources, especially in the field of soft bioelectronics where proteins and polysaccharides are vastly investigated, each with its own advantages. Thus, if one targets the use of both proteins and polysaccharides, there is a need of blending them together as composite materials to obtain a combination of their structural properties and functionalities. Here, we present an alternative to the latter approach by using mucin, which is a heavily glycosylated protein, as a candidate for the making of new conductive biopolymers. An additional advantage of using mucin is its high availability and low cost, which is derived from its abundance in animal mucus. Mucin is composed of a protein core with oligosaccharide side chains, thus providing a variety of chemical groups that can be targeted, either for the making of the macroscopic biopolymer or for manipulating charge transport across it. Here, we show how we can utilize mucin as a building block for the making of free-standing films with different configurations by intermolecular crosslinking targeting either the sugar units or specific amino acids. We further show that we can enhance the ionic (protonic) charge transport across the new material by 1,2-diol oxidative cleavage or maleylation, resulting in a range of measured conductivities from 0.5 to 2.2 mS/cm at ambient conditions. Our study is the first to show the possibility of making conductive glycoprotein films, which opens a new direction for their further study and integration as conductive biomaterials.