Comparative biophysics of intermediate filament based materials

本提案中描述的工作将继续我的实验室在NSERC的资助下在生物材料和仿生学领域进行了五年的工作。生物材料是由生物体制造的材料和结构，我们研究它们是为了了解生物体如何利用它们来达到自己的目的，并获得可以帮助人类生产性能更高和/或环境可持续性的材料的见解。本申请拟对盲鳗黏液和鲸须两种材料进行研究。我们对盲鳗黏液感兴趣的部分原因是它的纤维增强了这种独特的生物材料。盲鳗黏液由成千上万的蛋白质线加固，这些蛋白质线在尺寸和机械性能上与蜘蛛丝相似。它们是在专门的细胞中产生的，这些细胞在细胞质中以某种方式制造出一条长约15厘米的单线。这项研究的目的之一是了解这些细胞是如何做到这一点的。我们期望从研究这些细胞中的线发育中获得的经验将产生新的见解，这将有助于利用纳米技术生产可持续材料的努力。我们还将研究当黏液渗出物与海水接触时，黏液成分被部署的机制。我们期望这项研究将揭示在粘液囊膜中存在新的离子和水通道，其中一些可能作为治疗药物有价值。我们还将研究鲸须的生物力学，并试图了解这种独特的角蛋白材料在面向舌头的边缘磨损形成一层纤维的过程，这种纤维被用来在这些动物身上从海水中过滤猎物。我们还将研究鲸须板之间间隔组织的机械设计，我们怀疑这是一种独特类型的角蛋白，适用于抑制鲸须在滤食过程中发生的鲸须板振荡。这项研究可能会导致设计过滤系统或独特的低弹性，能量耗散材料的新策略。

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.