Electrochemically Programmable Biochemical Networks for Animate Materials

Descripción del proyecto

Material didáctico para la toma de decisiones

Desde la piel hasta los músculos, las sustancias biológicas se adaptan automáticamente a su entorno, respondiendo a los cambios sin un control consciente. En este contexto, el equipo del proyecto eBioNetAniMat, financiado por el CEI, pretende aprovechar este principio para crear materiales artificiales capaces de tomar decisiones autónomas. En concreto, integrará redes de reacción química basadas en proteínas en actuadores blandos. Esto permitirá a los materiales procesar señales electroquímicas y decidir cómo moverse (girando, contrayéndose o realizando peristaltismo) por sí mismos. Mediante métodos de fabricación electroquímica de hidrogeles con patrones, en el proyecto se integrarán estas redes en actuadores biocompatibles. El objetivo es que el material resultante mejore la robótica blanda y la tecnología médica.

Objetivo

Life’s biological materials are animate materials, capable of adapting to their surroundings via actively changing in response to the environment. A key distinguishing feature of animate materials is their ability to autonomously make decisions over how to respond. An example of an animate material is your skin: on cold days the hairs on your skin rise to trap warm air without your conscious thought.

The ability of living materials to make decisions arises from biochemical reaction networks (e.g. protein signalling) in the material. The networks process environmental information and decide how to adapt the material in response. Artificial animate materials promise to be superior for many applications (e.g. soft robots, MedTech) compared to their inert counterparts as their decision-making abilities will enable them to leverage advantageous events into better outcomes and limit the damage from disadvantageous ones. However, currently, there is not a well-established route to fabricate artificial animate materials.

eBioNetAniMat charts a pathway to a new generation of electrochemically programmable artificial animate materials that act as soft actuators capable of autonomously making decisions about their movement. Novel, protein-based chemical reaction networks integrated into the actuators will process electrochemical stimuli and make decisions over how to generate chemo-mechanical motion, e.g. peristalsis, rotation. I will develop a method for electrochemically controlling protein-activity and use this to construct a series of novel, electrochemically programmable protein networks of increasing complexity. I will develop a new method for electrochemical fabrication of patterned hydrogels with new protein redox-binding tools. Finally, I will unite the new protein networks and gels together to make novel artificial animate actuators, that will be biocompatible, integrable with electronic devices and have potentially transformative impacts in MedTech + soft robots.