It’s the most elastic material on earth, and it’s what allows a flea to jump 100 times its own height, or the dragonfly to flap its wings 30 times a second.
A startup in Israel is genetically engineering the protein – called resilin – as a cheap, effective, and sustainable alternative to the ultra-thin glass (UTG) or special plastic (polyimide) currently used by Samsung, Lenovo, Motorola, Oppo, and other phone manufacturers.
“We decided to bring this amazing material into the industry,” says Dr. Liron Nesiel, CEO of Smart Resilin, who studied molecular biology, protein engineering, and biotechnology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“We don’t kill insects in order to take out their resilin. We use genetic engineering techniques to take the DNA that codes for it and we introduce it into bacterial cells that produce the resilin using a fermentation process, which is by definition a circular, ecological, and scalable process.
To give it the strength it needs, in addition to the flexibility, the resilin, derived from the fruit fly, or drosophila is combined with cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), usually derived from wood pulp.
Together they create a material that will be perfect in all but one, important respect. It isn’t actually waterproof, in its current form. But researchers are confident that’s a problem they can resolve.
“It’s a composite of sugar and protein and it’s soluble in water. But the screen itself is built from layers, so the first step is to use it in the internal but not the outer layer,” says Dr. Nesiel.
“In the future, we are looking to maybe use additional material to mix in our composite, or to add a coating layer from the outside that will prevent water from directly solubilizing the structure.
“We’ve had a lot of interest from companies that build smartphones, and they aren’t troubled by the fact that it is water-soluble. They say it’s OK, they can use it in the inner layer of the foldable smartphone.”
She says they’re working to develop a display with exactly the optical and mechanical properties that partner companies will want.
Any research in biology can throw up unexpected challenges, she says, but she hopes to resolve current issues in the next couple of years.
“We have been able to improve greatly in the last two years and there’s still development to go,” she says.
Samsung currently leads the market for foldable smartphones with its Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4, and there’s also the Motorola Razr 2022.
Source: No Camels/Youtube