Comparative biophysics of intermediate filament based materials

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The work described in this proposal will continue the work in the field of biomaterials and biomimetics that my lab has carried out for the last five years with funding from NSERC. Biomaterials are materials and structures that are made by organisms, and we study them in order to understand how organisms use them for their own purposes, and to gain insights that could help humans produce materials with improved performance and/or environmental sustainability. The research proposed in this application will focus on two materials, hagfish slime and whale baleen. We are interested in hagfish slime in part because of the remarkable fibres that reinforce this unique biomaterial. Hagfish slime is reinforced with tens of thousands of protein threads that resemble spider silks in their dimensions and mechanical properties. They are produced within specialized cells that somehow manufacture a single, continuous thread within their cytoplasm that is about 15 cm long. One aim of this research is to understand how these cells achieve this. We expect that lessons learned from studying thread development in these cells will yield novel insights that will aid in efforts to produce sustainable materials using nanotechnology. We will also investigate the mechanisms by which the mucus component of the slime is deployed when the slime exudate comes in contact with seawater. We expect that this research will reveal the presence of novel ion and water channels in membranes of mucus vesicles, some of which may have value as therapeutic agents. We will also investigate the biomechanics of whale baleen and attempt to understand the process by which this unique keratin material wears away on the edge facing the tongue to form a mat of fibres used to strain prey from seawater in these animals. We will also study the mechanical design of the spacer tissue between baleen plates, which we suspect is a unique type of keratin that is adapted for damping baleen plate oscillations that occur during filter feeding in baleen whales. This research could lead to novel strategies for the design of filtration systems or unique low-resilience, energy-dissipating materials.