Directing Self-Driven Biopolymers for Multifunctional Surfaces
Our goal is to functionalize surfaces with active matter components to confer synthetic surfaces with multifunctional properties, including facilitated transport and anti-fouling properties. We will advance our basic understanding of active matter and engineered biomembrane surfaces.
Through the magic of ‘active matter,’ matter that converts chemical energy into mechanical work to drive emergent properties, biology solves a myriad of seemingly enormous physical challenges. Using active matter surfaces, for example, our lungs clear an astronomically large number of particulate contaminants that accompany each of the 10,000 liters of air we respire per day, thus ensuring that the lung’s gas exchange surfaces remain functional. In this project, we will use molecular motors and driven biopolymers to engineer multifunctional surfaces that mimic the active matter surfaces in biology. The successful realization of this technology would generate tunable, “living” surfaces that combine the dynamic programmability of active matter and the molecular specificity of biological membranes, with new applications in surface transport and sensing processes.
