Rheological redundancy—from polymers to living cells

Solutions and gels of semiflexible polymers provide a template for the molecular description of a large class of soft materials including dispersed polysaccharides, carbon nanotubes, cytoskeletal proteins, and even living cells. These chemically very diverse systems all seem to share characteristic macroscopic mechanical properties, such as power‐law rheology, transitions from shear stiffening to softening, and plastic flow. We attempt to trace back the observed universality to the common meso‐scale structure, which is argued to conceal much of the molecular details and held responsible for the pronounced rheological redundancy.