This project was awarded through the "Special Guidelines for Submitting Collaborative Proposals under the Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation, and the Division of Electrical, Communications, and Cyber Systems - the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ENG-EPSRC) Lead Agency Activity" opportunity. This project is performed in collaboration with Imperial College, London, an institution in the UK.
Nontechnical description: Nature is a rich source of strong, sustainable, and biodegradable materials. These are difficult to recreate and re-engineer at the molecular scale. Recent achievements in synthetic biology open the door to a new manufacturing paradigm, Grown Engineered Materials (GEMs). GEMs will be produced in the same way that materials are made in nature: by different types of living cells working together, with each cell type producing a unique polymer. This material can be used with little additional processing. GEMs offer a route to make new products, offer sustainable alternatives to existing industries (filtration, textiles, advanced composites) or yield entirely new sectors (sensing and responsive materials).
This project will use synthetic biology approaches to develop the first generation of GEMs. These will be produced by co-cultivating a set of engineered microbes. These microbes will produce Bacterial nanoCellulose (BC) fibers and Elastin-Like Polypeptides (ELPs) fused to carbohydrate-binding domains. These are both repetitive biopolymers, and each has industrially-attractive properties on its own. Bacterial-made nanocellulose is exceptionally pure, biocompatible, and possesses a high mechanical load capability. Yeast-made ELPs are environment-responsive and can be designed to collapse or extend due to changes in levels of salt, pH, or temperature. The project consists of four objectives to be run in parallel by the UK and US teams. These are designed to tackle the two key hurdles to realizing GEMs: rational protein polymer design and optimizing high-level secretion of proteins. The team at Imperial College, London will construct and characterize an ELP library, as well as establish initial co-culturing of ELP secreting yeast and BC producing bacteria. The team at University of California, Riverside will apply systems biology (subcellular RNA-seq, Ribo-seq, and computational modeling) and directed evolution to generate hypersecreting yeast strains, as well as assess and optimize their performance under co-culturing conditions. A fifth objective will showcase how novel properties can be programmed into GEMs by engineering at the DNA level.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
