FRONTIERS IN PHYSICAL AND LIFE SCIENCES: BIO-INSPIRED AND BIOMIMETIC MATERIALS

Living organisms are true green chemist masters. They process tailored, functional, and structural materials across various length scales in (i) an aqueous environment, (ii) at ambient temperatures, and most importantly (iii) they use naturally-occurring compounds as building blocks. With the increasing necessity for more environmentally sustainable solutions, there are critical lessons to be learned by elucidating how nature synthesizes complex materials at a low energetic cost. Natural materials have also evolved to serve multifunctional roles, with often a unique set of properties not achieved in mad-made materials. This proposal seeks to contribute to the burgeoning field of biomimetic materials engineering, by expanding our understanding of the underlying principles of biological materials synthesis, structure, and chemistry, and to explore their translation into novel materials solutions, with particular emphasis on health-related and tissue engineering applications. The proposed work will use model systems that are biased towards marine invertebrates because of the relevance of their living environment to the human physiological milieu and of their accessibility. The research will rely strongly on a highly multi-disciplinary approach, which is recognized as a central strategy in order to make breakthrough discoveries in this field, Fig. 1. Efforts will be focused on creating a multidisciplinary team, in particular by hiring research personnel with distinct academic backgrounds, including molecular biologists, biophysicists, polymer chemists and computational materials scientists, who will help foster this vision. Three distinct but complementary aspects of bio-inspired materials will be pursued, including: (i) structure-property relationships from the macro- to the molecular scale, (ii) biochemistry and protein chemistry of biological materials and extra-cellular tissues, (iii) translation of fundamental biological processing and design principles into applied strategies for industrial and biomedical materials synthesis. I will initially focus my research on 4 types of model systems: (i) non-mineralized hard tissues with high abrasion resistance; (ii) bioelastomeric materials with shock-absorbing capability and selective permeability; (iii) hierarchical and complex mineralized tissues from mechanically active bio-tools; and (iv) underwater adhesives processed by complex coacervation for use as orthopedic glues. I will also maintain a keen eye toward the use of novel biological systems that might be added to our repertoire when they enhance or improve our current research direction.