Symposium SB12-Conductive Biological Materials

Electronic materials are conventionally the domain of human-made devices, but recent discoveries in cross-disciplinary areas have established that Nature makes materials that transport charges over long length scales as part of normal biological processes. Conductivity in such unconventional electronics materials, made of amino and nucleic acids and other biopolymers, are often poorly described by conventional transport models and require new theory for understanding long-range conductivity. These bioelectronic materials aim to interface synthetic electronic devices with biological systems, from biomolecules to cells, tissues, and entire organisms. Biological materials are ideal building blocks for satisfying these criteria due to their properties of biocompatibility, self-assembly and molecular recognition. In addition, the chemical diversity and specificity of sequence-programmable biopolymers can be designed to drive the formation of functional nanostructures and interfaces. The construction of electronic materials from biological building blocks also represents a promising approach to autonomous assembly of electronic devices from engineered organisms, including new electronic inputs and outputs for synthetic biology systems. In this symposium we will highlight work shedding light on mechanisms of charge transport in biological materials as well as bring together researchers from across traditional disciplinary boundaries to understand the guiding physical, chemical, and biological principles underlying conductivity in biological materials. The community studying these materials is spread across biology, physics, chemistry and engineering, but with recent advances in experimental and computational tools to probe these systems, there is a timely opportunity to convene a discussion on how these insights inform a materials science understanding of structure-processing-property relationships in these materials and resulting devices. In addition, this proposed symposium will highlight ways in which synthetic biology can be used to create functional bioelectronic interfaces in innovative device designs. We invite abstracts related to electronic conductivity in peptide- and protein-based materials, proton and other ion conductivity in biological materials, synthetic biology approaches to bioelectronic interfaces, structure and properties of novel conductive biological materials, the stimuli responsive assembly of conductive biomolecular materials, and bioelectronic interfaces and devices based on biological materials.

biological biological synthesis (assembly) biomimetic (assembly) electrical properties electronic structure protein