Proposed Research Project Title: Harnessing nature’s self-assembly processes for new multiscale materials.
Proposed Research Project Description: Nature is very good at self-assembly. You yourself are self-assembled from a single cell and a complex genetic code to yield a functional human being. In contrast, our assembly processes are laborious and error prone – think of every piece of electronic equipment you have ever owned that has failed, or the expertise required to maintain your car.
This proposal aims to harness just one of nature’s elegant selfassembly mechanisms and exploit it to yield new materials and possibly also components in new devices. All proteins, when treated in a certain way, will spontaneously “zip up” in the form of long, thin filaments 1/10,000th the size of a human hair. The filaments are like ropes in miniature, consisting of a number of strands wrapped around each other. For biological materials these filaments are remarkably robust, resistant to heat, chemicals and bending/ stretching.
As with all biological processes, when this process happens in an uncontrolled way it can lead to disease. However, biology has also used it to assemble structures found on the surface of bacteria that allow them to interact as a community. This proposal aims to examine the selfassembly of natural molecules into filaments, to determine the rules that govern how they assemble and their appearance. Bringing a number of these filaments together forms a sticky, translucent gel, so we also wish to examine how the filaments interact with each other. We will then add nonbiological functionality to the fibres, for example the ability to react to light or assemble larger structures made of hard materials on their surface.
Using each of these modifications as building blocks, we will progressively build up larger scale networks and structures, ultimately producing new and self-assembling materials that have their origins in nature but bear little or no resemblance to natural systems.