Friday, 10 November 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Chemistry Lecture Theatre 2

Speaker: Prof. Adam Perriman, Australian National University

Host: Dr Kaye Kang

Title: Engineered Living and Dead Materials: From 3D printable enzyme plastics to living bacterial microreactors

Abstract: Engineered living and dead materials present an exciting opportunity to integrate and scale outputs from synthetic biology. Such materials are currently being developed for a wide variety of applications, which range from gut microbiome re-engineering to fungal-bacterial composite building materials. Ideally, the biological component or its output should interface with and modulate the bulk structure of material, by driving assembly or chemical processes from the nano to the macro length scales. Accordingly, we present recent and ongoing research on the development of smart highly fabricable composite bionanomaterials and engineered living materials with tuneable emergent properties. Specifically, we describe the development of enzymatically-active melts1, membranes2, 3 and plastics4, with robust high fidelity structures, a new class of bioink comprising an oxidoreductase-mediated interpenetrating network (IDE) gel with thermoresponsive shape changing properties5 and a 3D bioprinted living bacterial microreactor that is capable of detoxifying organophosphates under flow.

1. Brogan, A.P., et al., Enzyme activity in liquid lipase melts as a step towards solvent-free biology at 150 C. Nature communications, 2014. 5(1): p. 5058.
2. Sharma, K.P., et al., Enzymatically Active Self‐Standing Protein‐Polymer Surfactant Films Prepared by Hierarchical Self‐Assembly. Advanced Materials, 2013. 25(14): p. 2005-2010.
3. Day, G.J., et al., A rationally designed supercharged protein-enzyme chimera self-assembles in situ to yield bifunctional composite textiles. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2021. 13(50): p. 60433-60445.
4. Zhang, W.H., et al., Three-dimensional printable enzymatically active plastics. ACS Applied Polymer Materials, 2021. 3(12): p. 6070-6077.
5. Klemperer, R.G., et al., Bienzymatic Generation of Interpenetrating Polymer Networked Engineered Living Materials with Shape Changing Properties. Advanced Materials Technologies, 2023: p. 2300626.

Bio: Adam Perriman is a Professor of Bioengineering at the Australian National University and holds a joint appointment with the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Bristol. He is also Director of the Bristol Centre for Bioprinting. He is internationally distinguished for his pioneering research on the construction and study of novel synthetic biomolecular systems, and his research interests span the fields of chemistry, synthetic biology and tissue engineering. His contributions to this field of interdisciplinary science led to him being named a Wellcome Trust Frontiers Innovator in 2015, and in 2016, he was awarded the British Biophysical Society Young Investigator’s Award and Medal. In 2019, he was named a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow. In 2017 he founded the cell therapy spinout biotech company CytoSeek, which has raised in excess of $10M (CytoSeek: https://www.cytoseek.uk/). His research into the development of novel biomaterials has generated extensive media coverage and has been featured nationally in RSC’s Chemistry World, The Chemical Engineer, New Scientist, and internationally in Nature, Nature Chemistry and Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN).

Links

Perriman Group: https://www.perrimangroup.co.uk/welcome
CytoSeek: https://www.cytoseek.uk/