Synthetic Biology

蛋白质是生物纳米机器，在所有生命形式中完成关键功能。它们能够在温和的条件下进行化学反应，并以极高的特异性识别其他分子，这使得它们在可持续工业和医学中的应用具有吸引力。然而，尽管它们在液体环境中普遍使用，蛋白质与固体元素相互作用的机制却知之甚少。此外，研究蛋白质结构元素的常用工具在固体界面上表现不佳，限制了我们建立这种理解的能力。现代知识的差距限制了这些有用分子在许多依赖于蛋白质-固体相互作用的高度相关应用中的可用性，例如塑料回收和慢性疾病的生物医学监测。Adam Damry博士的研究项目通过应用尖端的合成生物学方法来探测蛋白质功能，解决了这些障碍。合成生物学将工程原理导向生物学问题，目的是重新设计自然生物系统以创造新技术。利用这些技术，Damry博士和他的团队将创造基于蛋白质的工具，以可持续地降解和回收高污染的废塑料，开发更清洁的生物工业工艺，并设计用于糖尿病和癌症等慢性疾病的个性化治疗的生物医学设备——所有这些都依赖于蛋白质-固体相互作用。在此过程中，他们将学习描述蛋白质-固体界面行为的元素，并创建适合在这个独特空间中利用和理解蛋白质的方法。他们开发的方法将在一个迭代的“设计和学习”过程中使用，在这个过程中，这些新方法将用于创建越来越复杂的生物工具，这些工具的研究反过来又推动了进一步的方法改进。总的来说，这项工作将推进我们对蛋白质的基本理解，进一步使我们有能力利用这些有用的天然主力促进社会和技术发展，并允许工业和医疗工具的发展，以保护加拿大人民、环境和经济的福祉。

Proteins are biological nanomachines that accomplish critical functions in all lifeforms. Their ability to carry out chemical reactions under mild conditions and recognize other molecules with extremely high specificity makes their use attractive in sustainable industry and medicine. However, despite their common use in liquid environments, the mechanisms of protein interaction with solid elements are poorly understood. Moreover, common tools that investigate protein structural elements perform poorly at solid interfaces, limiting our capacity to build this understanding. This gap in modern knowledge limits the usability of these useful molecules in many highly relevant applications that rely upon protein-solid interaction, such as plastic recycling and the biomedical monitoring of chronic illnesses. Dr. Adam Damry's research program addresses these barriers through the application of cutting-edge synthetic biology methods that probe protein function. Synthetic biology directs engineering principles towards biological problems with the aim of redesigning natural biological systems to create new technologies. Using these techniques, Dr. Damry and his team will create protein-based tools to sustainably degrade and recycle highly-polluting waste plastics, develop cleaner bioindustrial processes, and design biomedical devices for the personalized treatment of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and cancer - all of which depend on protein-solid interactions. Along the way, they will learn elements describing how the protein-solid interface behaves and create methods that are tailored to harnessing and understanding proteins in this unique space. The methods they develop will be used in an iterative 'design and learn' process, where these novel methods will be used to create increasingly complex biological tools whose study in turn drives further methodological improvement.Overall, this work will advance our fundamental understanding of proteins, further enabling our capacity to harness these useful natural workhorses for societal and technological development and allowing the development of industrial and medical tools to protect the wellbeing of the Canadian people, environment, and economy.