Active Matter at the Nanoscale

About This Grant

Nontechnical summary The materials of tomorrow will have amazing properties. They should be strong, yet able to sense when they are breaking, move to heal themselves – similar to how your skin heals when it is cut. In Syracuse, NY, roads and bridges need constant repair when the asphalt and concrete materials break, especially in harsh winters and summers. The roads and bridges of the future could be made from materials that are active and able to sense when they are breaking and then move to fix themselves. These futuristic materials could be possible if we could understand how biological systems are able to do these same activities – sensing and healing. Unlike our current construction materials, biological systems and materials are active – using energy even at the smallest scales. These smallest scales are the nanoscale and they are about 1 billionth of a yard! At this level, proteins that use energy, called enzymes, are able to push and pull and organize everything. Enzymes could be a powerful source of understanding how biological materials can do the amazing things they do. Yet, we don’t know how they work. This research will give us new insights into how enzymes can move individually and collectively to change their organizations of themselves and other materials at the nanoscale. Further, we will be strengthening the local workforce through educating local students from the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and even post-doctoral levels with the funds from this grant. Together, this work will build our future – both our materials power and our human power. Technical summary The goal of this project is to understand how enzymes are able to use their energy at the nanoscale to perform productive work to organize themselves and other materials systems. We are currently at the beginnings of learning how such active systems work and can be harnessed to create materials. We use the biological enzymes as a starting place in the hopes that we can learn about how this works and ultimately reproduce the work in future, synthetic systems. We propose to main scientific objectives: (1) Can enzyme-powered active baths control condensed matter? (2) Can enzymes act as an active matter system? Both questions will be approached through careful experimental and theoretical means with informed skepticism. Question 1 will be explored using a protein condensate system to test the effects of a background of enzymes acting as a bath with higher energy than expected for a given temperature. Question 2 will examine if enzymes and groups of enzymes can collectively affect each other to cause self-organizations at the nanoscale, the way we know microscale active particles can. If we are to even understand the nanoscopic world, how it gains work from the seemingly chaotic melee of enzymatic activity, and harness it for our own purposes to make the active materials of the future, we need to explore, experiment, engineer, and design at the nanoscale. The proposed work does that to create new knowledge. 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.