International Research Fellowship Program: Control of the Dynamic Mechanical Properties of the Arthropod Elastic Protein, Resilin

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0601990DudekThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Daniel Dudek to work with Dr. John Gosline at the University of British Columbia.Elastic proteins are used in animals where long-range elasticity is needed for either energy storage, for damping of vibrations, for restoring structures to their resting position without involving muscles, and for allowing frequent, repeated, rapid deformations of material. The majority of soft biological materials used in both the circulatory and locomotor structures of animals have evolved to have frequency independent energy loss or material properties. Despite the clear advantages such properties have for structures used over a range of heart rates, stride frequencies, and temperatures, a clear understanding of how such properties arise and are controlled by animals is lacking. To begin to understand the molecular origins of frequency independent properties in biomaterials, this project will characterize the dynamic mechanical properties of resilin, a nearly pure protein of major importance in insects, under varying conditions of pH, temperature, and hydration. The PIs hypothesize that by controlling the degree of hydration via pH and solute concentrations, insects that use resilin at 5, 50, or 500 cycles per second all use a material with similar properties. An understanding of how insects exploit the entire property range of resilin via chemical or evolutionary control will lead to a better understanding of how all elastomeric proteins function in animals. Synthesizable, self-aggregating biological materials are of current interest for pharmaceutical delivery, medical devices, and robotics. Resilin is bacterially synthesizable but it cannot be used in biologically inspired engineering applications until a database for the range of properties of this biomaterial is available. This project will provide that database.