Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Life-Cycle (Life-like Supramolecular Materials based on Reaction Cycles with Designed Feedback) Período documentado: 2021-01-01 hasta 2022-06-30 Resumen del contexto y de los objetivos generales del proyecto The “Life-Cycle” ERC proposal aims to develop a new class of artificial supramolecular materials that are kept in sustained non-equilibrium states by continuous dissipation of chemical fuels. Said more simply, we aim to develop artificial materials that have an internal metabolism, materials that need “food” (or as we call it “chemical fuel”), and excrete waste. Supramolecular polymers in current artificial materials stick together through weak reversible bonds that can be exchange by thermal energy. In contrast, natural supramolecular polymers such as those in the cytoskeletal network use chemical fuels such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to achieve an incredible adaptivity, motility, growth, and response to external inputs. Development of chemically fueled artificial supramolecular polymers should therefore lead to more life-like materials that could perform functions so far reserved only for living beings. In the long term, we hope our life-like materials can engage in two-way communication with living beings or tissues, and result in improvements in (regenerative) medicine and in materials science in general. Trabajo realizado desde el comienzo del proyecto hasta el final del período abarcado por el informe y los principales resultados hasta la fecha So far, we have developed 4 different reaction cycles that can control self-assembling systems. Two of these cycles have given rise to oscillations, which are often found in biological systems, such as in microtubules. Another cycle gave rise to a new material, which has a time programmable life-time of disappearance. That is, depending on the amount of chemical fuels added to the material, it will disassemble for a well-defined time, and then reassemble again. Avances que van más allá del estado de la técnica e impacto potencial esperado (incluida la repercusión socioeconómica y las implicaciones sociales más amplias del proyecto hasta la fecha) Our current focus is on life-like materials that have an internal mechanism to produce their own fuels and recycle the waste they produce, in order to stay away from the thermodynamic equilibrium (that is “death”) for extended periods of time. The materials properties of such life-like artificial systems are virtually unexplored.
