Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2022-2023).

Electronic devices are an essential part of our daily lives. They include conventional batteries, solar panels, electronic circuits in computers, responsive touch screens, and many more. Generally, these devices rely on efficient or tunable charge transport phenomena. Recently, devices have become more portable and an interest in incorporating self-powered sensors, diagnosis systems, and other electronics in wearable clothing or skin patches is growing. However, traditional methods for constructing electronic devices require energy intensive processes, and involve the use of toxic chemicals and rare earth metals.

Here, as an alternative, I propose to use non-toxic biologically-derived materials to assemble biocompatible, light weight, and environmentally-friendly devices. Nature has evolved microorganisms, proteins and biopolymers with exquisite properties. For instance, some proteins can spontaneously assemble into fibrous structures, and can easily be modified through genetic engineering to tune their properties. They can also be produced at low cost and large scale using inoffensive bacteria as factories. Such protein fibers, with nanoscale dimensions, can serve as building blocks to assemble nanowire-like structures. Specifically, two different types of fibers are of interest: 1) fibers with complex nanoscale structures or assembly properties that can serve as scaffolds for conductive materials; 2) naturally conductive protein fibers produced by bacteria that could directly be used directly as conductive materials and integrated in devices.

First, this research program aims at engineering naturally-derived protein fibers to modify their physical properties, and allow them to conduct charges, fluoresce, or sense specific chemicals. Combining novel physical properties with biological functions such as biocompatibility or biomolecule recognition will lead to the development of multifunctional materials. Second, this program aims at exploiting naturally conductive fibers, and at scaling-up their production in order to harvest enough conductive fibers to fabricate real-world materials, electrodes, devices, and coatings for large surfaces. In both cases, the final materials will be incorporated into functional sensors for environmental contaminants or disease markers, and into various types of energy conversion and storage devices like solar cells or batteries. Engineered protein fibers will be non-toxic and light weight, and they could be integrated in clothes, or deposited on the skin to serve as wearable electrodes. Successful completion of this work will represent significant steps towards the creation of a new generation of biocompatible and more portable electronic devices. It could lead to changes in the fabrication processes required to produce common devices, while minimizing consumers and industries environmental impact.