Fig. 1: Aspect ratio controls the coordination and rotational restriction of the building block, altering the protein network rigidity.
a Crystal structure of protein L (PDB code: 1HZ6) and a schematic depicting the increasing aspect ratio (AR) of polyprotein building blocks as an increase in the polyprotein length. b The storage modulus of pL hydrogels as a function of building block AR, at varying pL polyprotein concentrations (measured in mg ml−1), solid lines show fits using a double sigmoidal fit (Eq. 4), full fitting parameters provided in Supplementary Table 2. Dashed lines show the extracted ARc points for each protein concentration. Supplementary Table 3 shows the equivalent protein and water volume fractions of pL hydrogels. Data points are presented as mean values ± SEM, where n = 3. c Average coordination, ζ, determined from the simulation suite BioNet, as a function of building block AR. d ARc values extracted from panel b using Eq. 4 (purple squares) and the calculated (Eq. 1) critical aspect ratio (black line) of pL polyprotein rods in solution (i.e. AR at which the rod-like polyproteins can no longer freely rotate in solution) as a function of polyprotein concentration in solution. All error bars show the standard error.
