Researchers in Wageningen have become the first in the world to create so-called catch bonds in the laboratory, which become stronger when force is applied to them. They report in the journal Nature Chemistry that this had previously only occurred in nature.

It started like so many things, begins Bauke Albada, associate professor at Wageningen University & Research (WUR). Researchers looked at nature and found something special: bonds that resist mechanical forces, called the catch bond. Normally, a bond weakens or breaks when pressure is applied, but in the case of the catch bond, the bond actually becomes stronger. ‘You can see this, for example, in white blood cells in the bloodstream, which need to be able to stick together in strong currents, but roll freely in slow currents’, says Albada.

Despite the fact that the catch bond is known to occur in nature, no one had managed to create it in the laboratory – until now. ‘It was up to the curiosity of the scientists to do it’, says Albada with a laugh. ‘Most papers have looked at this phenomenon at the single-molecule level, using an atomic force microscope to look at a single molecular interaction. But nature uses the bonds multivalently and at a macroscopic level, and that turned out to be the key to making the catch bond.