Is there life beyond biology? How does chemistry become biology? Beyond formulating questions that are intellectually challenging, the main objective of this proposal was to find features of life in artificial synthetic constructs to generate technologies at the Living/Non-Living interface. The work employed cell units as a source of inspiration, which act as highly cooperative machinery to work in unison and produce cellular functions such as growth, communication, nourishment, or reproduction. In order to stay alive and produce their complex functions, they continuously produce energy gradients and metabolite transport in a state that is out-of-equilibrium with their environment. The overall goal of AutoPolymer has been to generate polymeric nanoparticles with capacity to undergo these out-of-equilibrium states and perform functions that remind us to living systems. For example, predatory particle populations that could feed from prey particle populations were explored in an aim to establish systems that could self-synthesise in the near future. In another example, the project took inspiration from the circadian rhythm which uses day and night cycles to regulate the alternation of metabolic activity. In these processes, the oscillation of metabolite concentrations is controlled by chemical hierarchical networks of independent oscillators that communicate and regulate each other to adapt to light intensity. By generating out-of-equilibrium polymer-enzyme hybrids that could catalyse antagonistic reactions in response to light, oscillations of chemical concentrations could be achieved. Overall, these results establish the developed chemical platform as a highly promising proof-of-concept to achieve systems at the Living/Non-Living interface that can manipulate cell activity finding applications in the modulation of bioreactors for the synthesis of compounds of industrial interest, or to generate motile, self-adaptive biomedical implants.
The multidisciplinary nature of this highly ambitions project was strongly supported by its localisation within the world-renowned Stevens Group at Imperial College London. The diverse nature of the project required input from a number of personnel within the Group with research backgrounds across chemistry, materials science, cell biology, molecular dynamics simulations, and spectroscopy and was crucial to meeting project outcomes. Ongoing collaborations which have been established as a result of this fellowship will continue to drive this work towards future applications.
