Collaborative Research: DMREF: Living biotic-abiotic materials with temporally programmable actuation

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY

A team of five physicists, biologists, and engineers aim to design and create a new class of self-directed, programmable, and reconfigurable materials inspired by cells and capable of producing force and motion. This approach will capitalize on two important design principles of living organisms: (1) cells are composite in nature to meet numerous functional demands, and (2) decision-making and timing are achieved through biomolecular circuitry.

This effort will couple synthetic hydrogels to living layers of active polymer composites infused with cellular timing circuits to produce next-generation materials that self-actuate programmable cycles of work and motion. The proof-of-concept design will be a gap-closing micro-actuator that closes upon exposure to light and then autonomously re-opens at times and locations programmed into the embedded cell circuits.

The material development aims, customized high-throughput characterization, and publicly shared property-formulation libraries will empower the broader Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) community to manufacture and deploy such disruptive materials of the future.

The effort will provide opportunities to a diverse set of undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, graduate student, and postdoctoral researchers to broaden the STEM-trained workforce pool. Specifically, the effort will build a new undergraduate research and professional development program with students pursuing interdisciplinary materials research across the five campuses.

By developing a fundamental understanding of how to manufacture and control such materials, this project will enable exciting future applications for self-healing infrastructure, self-regulating delivery vehicles, self-propulsive materials, micro-robotics, and programmable dynamic prosthetics. TECHNICAL SUMMARY

The overarching goal of this research is to develop the foundational technologies, predictive models, and formulation libraries needed to pioneer a new class of autonomous reconfigurable materials with self-generated spatiotemporal control. The project will engineer active biotic-abiotic materials that uniquely emulate living organisms–performing robust autonomous programs without intervention–in contrast to current active matter systems that are labile in nature and require external triggers or contrived conditions to enable activity.

Leveraging advances in synthetic biology and active matter physics, and guided by multi-scale mechanistic modeling, the effort will functionalize layers of abiotic hydrogels and active cytoskeleton composites with cellular circuitry for in situ bioproduction of material-modifying proteins to impart temporal control of mechanics, structure and activity. This will allow the research to spatiotemporally program restructuring, work, and motion with an autonomous gap-closing actuator built from abiotic-biotic layers programmed to produce cytoskeleton-modifying proteins on a user-defined schedule.

In this way, iterative design-build-test-learn cycles will be utilized to accelerate discovery–linking theory, fabrication, computation, and characterization to establish a broad phase space of structure-mechanics-function relationships. The modular material platform, multi-scale mechanistic modeling, mechanical and structural characterization, and publicly disseminated formulation-property database will contribute to the overarching goals of the MGI to harness autonomous, biomolecular systems and create next-generation programmable living materials.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.