UC Berkeley bioengineer, Seung-Wuk Lee, is working to harness genetically engineered viruses for the creation of microstructures and biomimetic materials (materials that imitate natural structures in the body such as that found in skin, teeth, and corneal tissue).
Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) held a webcast with Lee to discuss the new viral synthesis technology. As his team describes in their paper, self-templating (the concept of a molecule using itself as a template such that one molecule X serves as the positional template for the next molecule, also X), has not been thoroughly explored as a means of engineering synthetic materials. So, Lee’s team decided to create a simple, single-step technique to direct benign bacterial viruses called M13 phages to serve as building blocks for materials with diverse physical, optical and chemical properties. The M13 phage virus is commercially available, well-documented and easy to harvest after tuning of genetic structure for a specific purpose.
When these viruses are put to work in a controlled environment, they produce highly ordered structures. Variables such as the available surface of the glass substrate, concentration of viruses, and ionic concentrations all affect the type of structure produced. So far, Lee’s team has successfully created three categories of films.
“We strongly believe that our novel approach to constructing biomimetic ‘self-templated’, supramolecular structures closely mimics natural helical fiber assembly,” says Lee. “One important reason is that we not only mimicked the biological structures, but we also discovered structures that have not been seen in nature or the laboratory…”
Eventually, the biomimetic materials produced can be applied to various ends such as tissue replacement for patients. Admittedly, tissue engineering is already possible through other means, but what makes the viral method remarkable is the hands-off efficiency and simplicity of the whole process.
Below is a video of the technology being used to create a periodic texture:
