Project description
Digital strategies to identify and engineer next-gen electroswitchable polymers
Adhesives are everywhere. They are in phones, medical devices, and construction. However, once bonded, most adhesives are difficult or impossible to remove without damage. This limits recycling, repair, and reuse, wasting both materials and energy. What if there were a way to design glues that attach firmly when needed, but release cleanly on command? The ERC-funded IDefix project aims to make this possible. By combining peptide chemistry, high-throughput sequencing, and machine learning, it deciphers how polymers interact with surfaces to create tunable, ‘intelligent’ adhesives. The team’s data-driven design platform, SurPhage, identifies molecular structures that respond to electric or mechanical triggers, paving the way for reversible coatings, self-healing composites, and even remote-controlled medical patches.
Objective
Generating novel polymer functions based on rational design criteria, derived from deep statistical analysis of massive experimental data sets, would fundamentally impact materials development and represent the next evolutionary step in macromolecular engineering.
The IDefix project establishes a generic information-based design strategy to define polymer–surface interactions that represent the key property in various applications. The project focuses on advancing adhesives, to facilitate material-specific adsorption and triggerable desorption by distinct electrochemical transformations.
The rationale of engineering such polymers is extracted from peptide phage display (PD) biopanning with an advanced selection scenario and using next-generation sequencing (NGS). This allows to screen 10^9 sequences and readout of 10^6, providing the data sets to feed machine learning (ML) tools.
A new software tool “SurPhage” is developed and tailored to the material-oriented biopanning. Leveraging ML concepts, sequence data interpretation and feature abstraction are combined with sequence-function data of a broad analysis pipeline to learn on the rationale that feeds generative models for in-silico design.
The underlying chemistry relies on peptides with L-3,4-Dihydroxyphenylalanin (Dopa)-residues that show potent catechol anchors and a unique debonding mechanism on quinone oxidation. However, the strategy enables to identify hidden champions and discover novel Dopa-free mechanisms.
Employing the design rationale an IDefix platform is developed, covering polymers from artificial adhesive proteins to copolymers. These enable the electrochemical manipulation of adhesives, coatings or membranes, facilitating applications of debonding on command or dimming of permeability. Combining IDefix materials with piezoelectric elements leads to self-reinforcing mechano-responsive composites and integrating in near-field communication devices enables remote controlled drug release patches.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences computer and information sciences software
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology virology
- natural sciences chemical sciences electrochemistry electrolysis
- natural sciences biological sciences biochemistry biomolecules proteins
- natural sciences chemical sciences polymer sciences
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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10117 Berlin
Germany
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