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

0601990Dudek国际研究奖学金计划使美国科学家和工程师能够在国外进行9到24个月的研究。该计划的奖项为联合研究提供了机会，并利用国外独特或互补的设施，专业知识和实验条件。该奖项将支持丹尼尔杜德克博士与不列颠哥伦比亚省大学的约翰戈斯林博士合作24个月的研究奖学金。弹性蛋白质用于需要长距离弹性的动物，用于能量储存，用于振动阻尼，用于在不涉及肌肉的情况下将结构恢复到其静止位置，并且用于允许材料的频繁、重复、快速变形。大多数用于动物循环和运动结构的软生物材料已经进化为具有与频率无关的能量损失或材料特性。尽管这些特性对于在心率、步频和温度范围内使用的结构具有明显的优势，但缺乏对这些特性如何产生以及如何由动物控制的清晰理解。为了开始了解生物材料中频率无关特性的分子起源，本项目将描述节枝弹性蛋白的动态力学特性，节枝弹性蛋白是一种在昆虫中非常重要的几乎纯的蛋白质，在不同的pH值，温度和水合作用条件下。PI假设，通过pH值和溶质浓度控制水合程度，以每秒5、50或500次循环使用节枝弹性蛋白的昆虫都使用具有相似性质的材料。了解昆虫如何通过化学或进化控制来利用节枝弹性蛋白的整个特性范围，将有助于更好地了解所有弹性蛋白在动物中的功能。可合成的、自聚集的生物材料是当前用于药物递送、医疗设备和机器人的感兴趣的材料。Resilin是细菌合成的，但它不能用于生物启发工程应用，直到一个数据库的范围内的性质，这种生物材料是可用的。该项目将提供该数据库。

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.