An exclusive FREE webinar hosted by     

This webinar has already taken place. However, in case you missed it or would like to listen again, the on-demand webinar is available below:

Webinar: Bio-Inspired Materials - Using Genomics to Engineer Recyclable Materials

Originally aired February 25, 2014.

Dr. Melik C. Demirel, Professor of Engineering, Materials Research Institute and Huck Institutes of Life Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, discusses the use of elastomers to expedite the process of creating eco-friendly materials that can be manufactured into nano- and micro- scale devices¹.

Bio-derived or natural materials have been a fundamental part of human life since the dawn of civilization. However, due to exploitation of natural resources and cost issues, synthetic materials are replacing bio-derived materials in many industrial products. There is, accordingly, an ongoing and unmet need to develop novel materials that can be produced easily from renewable resources, at reduced cost and in a broad array of useful applications. Using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in conjunction with high throughput proteomics and advanced materials characterization, it is now possible to rapidly characterize useful protein-based model systems and to later express them by recombinant expression for downstream development according to an approach developed by Guerette, Hoon, and co-workers2. Alternatively, direct extraction of elastomers from biological organisms also provides a new generation of recyclable-engineered materials. Understanding the structures and functional characteristics of these novel elastomeric materials will expedite the design, fabrication and synthesis of eco-friendly, recyclable, advanced materials with resilience to environmental factors, and novel wetting, friction and transport properties².

The original paper describing the biometrics research in the context of transport, adhesion and wetting was published in “Advanced Functional Materials” according to the following bibliographic reference:

¹Hancock, M., Sekeroglu, K., Demirel, M.C., "Bioinspired Directional Surfaces for Adhesion, Wetting and Transport" ADVANCED FUNCTIONAL MATERIALS, Vol. 22, pg. 2223-2234, doi: 10.1002/adfm.201103017 (2012).

²Guerette, P.A., Hoon, S., Seow, Y., Raida, M., Masic, A., Wong, F.T., Ho VHB, Whye K., Kong, W.K., Demirel, M.C., Pena-Francesch, A., Amini, S., Tay G.Z., Ding D., Miserez, A., “Accelerating the Design of Biomimetic Materials by Integrating RNA-Seq with Proteomics and Materials Science”, NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY, Vol. 31, pg. 908–915, doi:10.1038/nbt.2671 (2013).
 

PARTICIPANTS  

	Presenter: Melik C. Demirel, Ph.D. Professor of Engineering Pennsylvania State University
	Moderator: Dawn Van Dam General Manager Cambridge Healthtech Associates (CHA)