Chemistry in Pictures: Eww, that’s a tongue

Have you ever held up a mirror and stared, really stared, at your tongue? Efren Andablo-Reyes and coworkers at the University of Leeds went far beyond that. They worked with the Leeds dental school to collect microscale tongue impressions in multiple materials from volunteers, then digitized 3-D images of the molds (top, with scalebar). With that data, they developed a method to computationally simulate the tongues’ randomly spaced but evenly distributed patterns and structures. Finally, they used a combination of 3-D printing and soft-matter lithography to spit out their simulated tongues in the real world (bottom). Why? Up to now, the team says, researchers who want to study how tongues in isolation interact with the matter they encounter have had to make do with dead tongues or models with grid-like feature patterns that fail to replicate the friction, wettability, and changes with stretching seen on the real thing. They hope that their better tongue mimic will find applications in food science, drug delivery, and oral care research.

Credit: ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2020, DOI: 10.1021/acsami.0c12925

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