The strength of 3-D-printed products could be improved through a new technique developed by scientists at UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The new process, which uses UV irradiation, could strengthen bonds of 3-D-printed materials to withstand 200 percent more transverse stress, according to a study published in Macromolecules.

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in eastern Tennessee, physicist Leah Broussard is trying to open a portal to a parallel universe.

Products like cosmetics, adhesives, and paints rely on a common key component: gels. Polymer gels, a gel type with unique properties, have piqued the interest of researchers because of their potential uses in medical applications.

In biological membranes, functional domains or so-called lipid “rafts” have proven difficult to study systematically, owing in part to their chemical complexity and that of membrane composition, which often contains thousands of different biomolecules, including hundreds of distinct lipid species. Neutron scattering techniques have recently proven capable of studying nanoscopic lipid heterogeneities populating spherical vesicles. However, the development of analytical approaches capable of predicting and analyzing nanoscopic lipid phase separation from such experiments has not kept up with experiment. Importantly, neutron scattering techniques are among the few capable of providing nanoscale structural and dynamical information without the need of extrinsic probes (e.g., fluorescent labels) that are sometimes known to alter the interactions responsible for lipid rafts formation.

Transbilayer asymmetry is a ubiquitous yet poorly understood aspect of biological membranes. Increasing evidence suggests that the lipid compositional asymmetry of plasma membranes (PMs) not only confines specific lipids to the exoplasmic leaflet (in the case of sphingomyelin) or cytoplasmic leaflet (in the case of aminophospholipids), but also results in unique membrane properties that are almost certainly crucial for normal cellular function (Figure 1). The vast majority of biophysical studies make use of symmetric model membranes to study biomembrane characteristics, including structure and dynamics as well as the behavior of membrane proteins – even though these highly simplified models most likely fail to capture crucial aspects of the PM environment. With the use of a host of techniques, including neutron scattering, we aim to understand the structural and dynamic impact lipid asymmetry has on the PM.