Electrochemically Programmable Biochemical Networks for Animate Materials

Opis projektu

Materiały dydaktyczne na potrzeby podejmowania decyzji

Od skóry po mięśnie – substancje biologiczne automatycznie dostosowują się do otoczenia, reagując na zmiany bez świadomej kontroli. Finansowany przez ERBN projekt eBioNetAniMat ma na celu wykorzystanie tej zasady do stworzenia sztucznych materiałów zdolnych do podejmowania autonomicznych decyzji. Zespół będzie osadzał oparte na białkach sieci reakcji chemicznych w miękkich siłownikach. Umożliwi to materiałom przetwarzanie sygnałów elektrochemicznych i samodzielne decydowanie o tym, jak się poruszać (obracać, kurczyć lub wykonywać ruchy perystaltyczne). Wykorzystując elektrochemiczne metody wytwarzania wzorzystych hydrożeli, zespół zintegruje te sieci z biokompatybilnymi siłownikami. Powstały materiał ma przyczynić się do rozwoju robotyki miękkiej i technologii medycznej.

Cel

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.