TAGS: Biobased Solutions
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named UC Santa Barbara and UCLA joint partners in the BioPolymers, Automated Cellular Infrastructure, Flow, and Integrated Chemistry: Materials Innovation Platform (BioPACIFIC MIP).
A Five-year, USD 23.7 Mn Collaboration
The five-year, $23.7 million collaboration is part of the NSF Materials Innovation Platforms (MIP) Program and has a scientific methodology reflecting the broad goals of the Materials Genome Initiative, which aims to develop new materials “twice as fast at a fraction of the cost."
This exciting project recognizes and leverages several complementary, overlapping areas of expertise at UC Santa Barbara and UCLA, and significantly expands the existing longtime partnership established through the respective California Nanosystems Institutes. This new MIP project holds great promise in terms of addressing the grand challenge of discovering high-performing polymeric replacements for petroleum-based materials.
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This new MIP grant is a major milestone for our campus. It recognizes and builds on our strength in collaborative materials research and will enable UCSB, working with UCLA, to become an international hub for the development of new high-performance bio-based polymers that may one day favorably impact life around the globe,” said Rod Alferness, dean of the UCSB college of engineering.
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NSF is excited to support this new MIP focusing on the convergence of materials research and biology on two University of California campuses. The BioPACIFIC MIP is designed to advance fundamental science toward sustainable material development, which is important for society,” said Linda Sapochak, director of the NSF division of materials research.
The BioPACIFIC MIP leverages the facilities, expertise and experience of UCSB and UCLA, partners since 2000 in the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), which has headquarters at both campuses. It will include faculty and affiliates — 13 from UCSB and seven from UCLA, supported by seven scientific staff.
BioPACIFIC MIP will impact a large number of students and researchers at both campuses and across the country in the fields of materials science, biology, chemistry and engineering. This next generation of researchers will share tools, samples, data, software and know-how for the acceleration and collective advancement of science and technology, with a focus on societal impact.
Generating the Building Blocks of Bio-based Plastics
BioPACIFIC MIP is dedicated to identifying microorganisms that can be used as biological “factories” to generate the building blocks of bio-based plastics with superior properties to existing petroleum-based polymeric materials. It is envisioned as a closed-loop scientific system comprising every aspect of
bio-based polymeric material development: design and discovery, building, testing and learning, with built-in feedback loops. Researchers will be welcomed from around the nation to develop, characterize and engineer new materials based on merging synthetic biology with material synthesis.
Experts in biosynthesis will markedly change how yeast, fungi and bacteria use their biological factories to generate building blocks, and will work closely with experts who specialize in cutting-edge polymerization technology, material characterization and polymer physics, and simulation.
Their collective know-how will be coupled with an automated, high-throughput living bioreactor platform and robotic automation to rapidly prepare libraries of bio-based polymer materials. Integration of these platforms with computer modeling and machine learning, as well as user access to a robust facility infrastructure at UCSB and UCLA, both of which house state-of-the-art fabrication, characterization and screening tools, will further the process of optimizing these plastics derived from living organisms.
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We aim for BioPACIFIC to provide users from an extensive array of academic and industry partners with the tools and technology guidance needed to make new breakthroughs in the area of biomaterial synthesis, even if they themselves do not have the necessary expertise,” said Tal Margalith, executive director of the UCSB operation.
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Unlike many of our collaborative grants, which solely support on-campus efforts, BioPACIFIC will focus on building enabling tools and knowledge bases to bolster the biomaterials community across the nation and the world,” said Megan Valentine, a UCSB mechanical engineering professor who leads a group within BioPACIFIC focused on characterization and structure-property relationship determination.
“Nature has an expansive range of functional building blocks, and we now know it’s possible to synthesize them into better macro-materials, like polymers, We will be extracting blocks from nature that you can’t access in any other way and then using synthetic routes to combine them into materials that have properties that don’t currently exist,” said Read de Alaniz, a UCSB professor of chemistry and BioPACIFIC MIP co-PI, who also associate director of the CNSI at UCSB.
Source: UC Santa Barbara