Materials Discovery through Exploration of Biomolecular Space

DIPC Seminars

Speaker: Rein Ulijn
City University of New York
When: 2024/03/11
12:00
Place: Donostia International Physics Center (Hybrid Seminar)
Host: Ivan Sasselli
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Materials Discovery through Exploration of Biomolecular Space

Living systems provide the most sophisticated materials known. These materials and systems are created from a fully conserved set of just a few dozen building blocks common to all life forms. This observation begs a profound question: why can’t everything, including things that life has not explored, be made from biological building blocks? The Ulijn lab is taking steps to making this vision a reality, not by copying biology, but by developing methodology for bottom- up design, discovery and evolution of functional materials and biofluids to redesign biomolecules for a variety of applications.1 The talk will include our latest research on ongoing projects: (i) Design of peptide modalities that give rise to formation of liquid condensates;2,3 (ii) Mechano-responsive peptide crystals;4 (iii) Drug-matched peptide nanoparticles; (iv) Experimental learning and memory using sequence-adaptive peptide mixtures.5,6 Overall, our research demonstrates that peptides, and dynamically exchanging mixtures of peptides, show significant potential as designable and tunable nanomaterials for a variety of applications in biomedicine and green nanotechnology.

References:
1. Sheehan, et al., Chem. Rev., 2021, 121, 13869-13914.;
2. A. Jain, et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2022, 144, 15002-15007.
3. D. Sementa, et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2023, e202311.
4. R. Piotrowska, et al., Nature Materials, 2021, 20, 403-409.;
5. A. Jain, et al., Chem, 2022, 8, P1894-1905.;
6. S. Kassem, et al. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2023, 145, 9800-9807.

Zoom: https://dipc-org.zoom.us/j/99721561320
Youtube: https://youtube.com/live/6paNcj-YSkY