Stronger and (now) Longer Synthetic Collagen

摘要

Prevalence of Collagen. Collagen is the most abundant protein in modern animals, including humans. The natural selection of collagen as an anatomical scaffold was made long ago. Collagen has been isolated from soft tissue in the fossilized bones of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex and a half-million-year-old mastodon. No isolated DNA is that old. The archaeological longevity of collagen is even more remarkable considering that a peptide bond has a half-life of 400 years, whereas a phosphodiester bond has a half-life of 30 million years.