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. 2022 Feb 16;13(2):352. doi: 10.3390/genes13020352

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© 2022 by the authors.

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Examples of self-healing versus self-adhesion in a polymer network. The network is visualized as squiggly gray lines, broken chains are visualized as black squiggly lines. A broken end is indicated with a light-blue ball. (a) Self-healing: fast kinetic where two breaks (blue) rapidly find one another and heal (maroon). (b) Self-adhesion: slow kinetics where a break (blue) has to find a partner and exchange. The system has time to re-equilibrate and the broken chain exchanges with an ectopic site (making a new healed site (maroon)). Adapted from Rubinstein [77].