(Nanocarbons Division SES Young Investigator Award) Synthetic Biology Approaches for Overcoming Bottlenecks in Optical Nanocarbon Technologies

Abstract

Bioengineering is the synthetic biologist’s approach to engineering new materials. It has allowed researchers to overcome billions of years of evolution to create unnatural biomolecules that have been programmed to interface with synthetic materials or optimized to bind analytes through interactions unfounded in nature. Biomolecules offer unparalleled molecular recognition that can be tuned by engineers to create highly specific sensors. Unfortunately, biology has its limits; many biological optical sensors rely on fluorophores that photobleach, which limit sensor lifetime, at visible emission wavelengths that overlap with tissue absorption. Unlike these fluorophores, semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) benefit from fluorescent emissions that are indefinitely photostable, demonstrating sensitivities that can detect analytes down to the single molecule. Their near-infrared fluorescence wavelengths are also transparent to tissue absorption, allowing for continuous in vivo sensing. Unfortunately, these nanomaterials lack the molecular recognition biology has to offer.In a sense, the advantages and disadvantages posed by the fields of bio- and nano-materials engineering are highly complementary. This seminar focuses on the development of a new generation of NanoBiOptic devices – devices that exploit the synergy of nano-bio hybrids – for sensing applications. We apply bioengineering techniques, such as directed evolution and artificial nucleic acid design, to circumvent current approaches used to engineer SWCNT-based sensors. In demonstrating these techniques, we realize several previously intractable platforms for bioanalyte detection and for optically monitoring various biomolecular interactions. Thus, by reprogramming biological materials to behave in an otherwise non-natural manner, synthetic biology has the potential to complement the physical sciences in the engineering of new synthetic optical platforms.