Dr. Donald Ingber Abstract:

Biological Design Principles for the Nanotechnologist

The burgeoning field of Nanotechnology offers exciting new approaches to attack fundamental questions in biology, create smart medical devices, and positively impact human health. Creation of biologically-inspired nanotechnologies also could revolutionize how materials are designed and manufactured for industrial, aerospace and military applications.

But the fields are constrained by a lack of understanding of how living cells and tissues are constructed so that they exhibit their incredible organic properties, including their ability to change shape, move, grow, and self-heal.

These are properties we strive to mimic, but we cannot yet build manmade materials that exhibit these features, or develop devices to selectively control these behaviors. To accomplish this, we must uncover the underlying design principles that govern how cells and tissues form and function as hierarchical assemblies of nanometer scale components.

In this lecture, I will review work from my laboratory and others which has begun to reveal these design principles that permit self-assembly of 3D structures with great robustness, mechanical strength and biochemical efficiency, even though they are composed of many thousands of flexible molecular scale components.

We also are beginning to understand that biological materials are simultaneously “structure and catalyst”: the molecular lattices that form the frameworks of our cells and tissues combine mechanical functions and solid-phase biochemical processing activities.

In the course of the lecture, I also will describe how recently developed nanotechnologies have been used to create model systems for biological studies, and how they have led to new approaches to interface living cells with microchips, control mammalian cell and tissue development, and probe the process of mechanotransduction – how cells sense mechanical forces and convert them into biochemical responses.

Finally, the more fundamental question of how nanoscale structural networks impact information processing (signal transduction) networks to control cellular “decision-making” also will be explored. Understanding of these design principles that govern biological organization is critical for any nanotechnologist who wants to harness the power of biology.