(241b) There’s Plenty of Room at the (Nano/Bio) Boundary

The vast expansion of available synthetic biology tools has led to explosive developments in materials science. The increased accessibility of these tools has pushed the frontier of materials science into the field of engineering biological and even living materials. By coupling the tunable and robust optoelectronic properties of synthetic nanomaterials with the specificity and adaptability of biomaterials, one can re-purpose biology to fulfil needs that are otherwise intractable using traditional engineering approaches.

This presentation highlights applications in sensing and energy technologies that exploit the synergistic coupling of nanobio-hybrid materials at the boundary. This talk will discuss the development of bio-conjugated single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) for near-infrared fluorescence sensing. We discuss recent advancements in applying synthetic biology approaches, such as directed evolution[1-3], xeno nucleic acid engineering[4-5], and protein mutagenesis[6], to control the optical properties of these synthetic nanoparticle sensors for a range of applications. This presentation will also discuss complementary efforts in re-purposing biological materials for electronic applications, like microbial fuel cells [7] and “living photovoltaics” [8-9], through concomitant genetic re-programming and nanomaterial engineering. These demonstrations exemplify but a few examples of nanomaterial bottlenecks that we can overcome through anti-disciplinary approaches.

References

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• P. Lambert et al., bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/2023.06.13.544576 (2023).
• Rabbani et al., bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/2023.09.07.556334 (2023).
• J. Gillen et al., J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 9, 15, 4336–4343 (2018).
• J. Gillen et al., bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/2021.02.20.428669 (2021).
• Zubkovs et al., Nanoscale Adv. 4, 2420-2427 (2022).
• Mouhib et al., Joule 7, 2092–2106 (2023).
• Antonucci, et al., Nat. Nanotechnol. 17, 1111–1119 (2022).
• Antonucci, et al., Photochem. Photobiol. Sci. 22, 103–113 (2023).