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

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。一个由五名物理学家、生物学家和工程师组成的团队旨在设计和创造一种新型的自我导向、可编程和可重构的材料，这种材料的灵感来自细胞，能够产生力和运动。这种方法将利用活生物体的两个重要设计原则：(1)细胞在本质上是复合的，以满足许多功能需求；(2)决策和定时是通过生物分子电路实现的。这项工作将把合成水凝胶与注入细胞定时电路的活性聚合物复合材料的活层结合起来，生产出能够自我驱动可编程工作和运动周期的下一代材料。概念验证设计将是一个闭合缝隙的微型执行器，在暴露在光线下关闭，然后在嵌入单元电路中编程的时间和位置自动重新打开。材料开发目标、定制的高通量表征和公开共享的属性配方库将使更广泛的材料基因组计划（MGI）社区能够制造和部署这种未来的颠覆性材料。这一努力将为各种各样的本科生、学士后、研究生和博士后研究人员提供机会，以扩大stem培训的劳动力资源。具体来说，这项工作将建立一个新的本科研究和专业发展计划，让学生在五个校区从事跨学科材料研究。通过对如何制造和控制这些材料的基本理解，该项目将使自我修复基础设施、自我调节运载工具、自我推进材料、微型机器人和可编程动态假肢等令人兴奋的未来应用成为可能。本研究的总体目标是开发基础技术、预测模型和配方库，以开拓具有自生成时空控制的新型自主可重构材料。该项目将设计活性生物-非生物材料，这种材料独特地模仿活生物体，在没有干预的情况下执行强大的自主程序，而不是目前的活性物质系统，这些系统本质上是不稳定的，需要外部触发或人为条件来激活活动。利用合成生物学和活性物质物理学的进步，在多尺度机械建模的指导下，这项工作将使非生物水凝胶层和活性细胞骨架复合材料具有细胞电路的功能化，用于材料修饰蛋白的原位生物生产，以赋予力学、结构和活性的时间控制。这将使研究人员能够在时空上对重组、工作和运动进行编程，并使用由非生物-生物层构建的自动间隙关闭驱动器，按照用户定义的时间表生产细胞骨架修饰蛋白。通过这种方式，迭代设计-构建-测试-学习周期将被用来加速发现-连接理论、制造、计算和表征，以建立结构-力学-功能关系的广泛相空间。模块化材料平台、多尺度机械建模、机械和结构表征以及公开传播的配方属性数据库将有助于MGI利用自主生物分子系统和创造下一代可编程生物材料的总体目标。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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