Abstract The harvesting of sea silk, a luxurious golden textile traditionally obtained from the endangered mollusk Pinna nobilis, faces severe limitations due to conservation efforts, driving the search for sustainable alternatives. Atrina pectinata , a phylogenetically close relative within the Pinnidae family is identified, as a viable source of biomimetic sea silk. The byssal threads of A. pectinata can be processed using existing methods, providing a way to continue producing this historically significant text…

Understanding the motion of particles with multivalent ligand-receptors is important for biomedical applications and material design. Yet, even among a single design, the prototypical DNA-coated colloids, seemingly similar micrometric particles hop or roll, depending on the study. We shed light on this problem by observing DNA-coated colloids diffusing near surfaces coated with complementary strands for a wide array of coating designs. We find colloids rapidly switch between 2 modes: They hop—with long and fast st…

International audience

Abstract Soft materials are usually defined as materials made of mesoscopic entities, often self-organised, sensitive to thermal fluctuations and to weak perturbations. Archetypal examples are colloids, polymers, amphiphiles, liquid crystals, foams. The importance of soft materials in everyday commodity products, as well as in technological applications, is enormous, and controlling or improving their properties is the focus of many efforts. From a fundamental perspective, the possibility of manipulating soft mate…

Data for the manuscript "A unified state diagram for the yielding transition of soft colloids" to appear in Nature Physics