Fundamentals for Repurposing Nature's Building Blocks in Advanced Materials Applications

Over the last 3.6 billion years, nature has developed processes and materials with exquisite selectivity, specificity, and adaptability. Self-assembly has been one of the many strategies nature uses for generating nanostructures with precise organization, shape and functionalities. Self-assembling proteins are valuable building blocks allowing the construction of materials with versatile chemical properties and functions based on their tertiary and quaternary protein structures. Well-studied motifs from tandem repeat proteins (such as silk, elastin, collagen, keratin, resilin, and squid ring teeth-SRT) have been frequently used to create multifunctional materials for diverse applications exhibiting extraordinary physical responses that have not been observed in materials synthesized via usual routes. Besides their extraction from natural sources, derivatives of these biopolymers are engineered, e.g. via directed evolution. In this networking event, we will discuss in-vitro and in-vivo self-assembly of celluloses and will address how the structure of the helicoidal order of cellulosic building blocks reflect into their function and material properties. We then focus on using directed evolution to self-assemble tandem repeat biopolymers that can be tuned for predefined macroscopic symmetries, by controlling their packing symmetry or order. State-of-the art experimental and computational tools to predict performance of such genetically engineered materials will be presented and future directions, particularly for utilizing the dynamical properties of these materials, will be discussed.

This event will be held on September 2, 2020 from 4 - 8 pm in the MSK time zone.
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Event Schedule

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