Research

Our research is placed at the intersection between three research Themes: biomolecules and cells at interfaces, biological microfluidics, and information storage and processing in/by biological systems. It happens that these Themes also represent the progression from Science (of biomolecules and cells at interfaces), and Technology (of biological microfluidics), supporting the Engineering (of information storage and processing in/by biological systems). While overlapping, a few words about each research Theme.


Information storage and processing in/by biological systems

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Life wouldn’t be what it is without storing and processing information. We try to understand how information is stored at submolecular levels, e.g., on the molecular surface of proteins (Nicolau 2014) or at molecular level, e.g., in the molecular motors-assisted cytoskeletal ‘hardware’ of fungi (Held et al., 2019), and how information is processed by microorganisms using their ‘software’ – biological algorithms for space searching, for bacteria (Tokarova et al 2021 (incl SI)) and for fungi (Hanson_2006). If the understanding of these biological algorithms is advanced enough, they can be reverse-engineered leading to efficient computer procedures, e.g., bio-IT mimetics from fungi (Asenova et al 2016), or biosimulation from bacteria (Nicolau Jr_2008). Finally, we can design computers that use the massive parallelism of biological agents and their information processing to attempt to solve problems that are intractable for electronic computers. This biocomputing approach uses microfluidics networks encoding combinatorial problems explored either by molecular motors-propelled cytoskeletal filaments (Nicolau Jr Lard Korten et al (incl SI) 2016) or bacteria (van_Delft et al 2021). A review of this theme (rather uninspiring) here (My cat has some comments about Buddha-nature around 1:15 in the talk.)


Biological microfluidics

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While biological information theme is benefitting from the developments in the ‘technology’ of biological microfluidics, and thus some of the above research projects can be easily attributed here, there are also projects of specific interest. For instance, at the molecular level, protein molecular motors in vitro are essentially ‘inverted’ micro-/nano-fluidic devices, i.e., moving in static fluids (Nicolau_1999a, Fulga_2009, Kangiri 2022). More recently, we aim to mimic gas embolism, a devastating and neglected medical condition, in biomimetic vascularized systems on the chip.


Biomolecules and cells at interfaces

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Many of the above projects benefitted from the science of how biomolecules behave on artificial surfaces. The studies aiming to understand protein (Vasina_2009) and DNA at interfaces (Nicolau 2005a) used various techniques, such as Atomic Force Microscopy (Nicolau 2005b), quartz microbalance (Hanson et al (incl SI) 2017), surface-embedded amplification of fluorescence (Dobroiu van Delft et al (incl SI) 2019), and protein patterning (Clancy et al (incl SI) 2019). These studies contributed to the development of ultra-sensitive devices using protein molecular motors (van Zalinge 2012).