Discover the Mind-Blowing Secrets of Living Architecture! You Won’t Believe What ScienceDaily Reveals!

The distinction is important to the assistant professor at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, for both scientific and artistic reasons. With a PhD in biomedical engineering, several degrees in architecture and a devotion to sustainable design, Mogas-Soldevila brings biology into everyday life, creating materials for a future built halfway between nature and artifice.

The architectural technology you describe is unassuming at first glance: a freeze-dried pill, small enough to get lost in your pocket. But this tiny piece of matter, the result of more than a year of collaboration between designers, engineers and biologists, is a biomaterial that contains a “living-like” system.

When touched with water, the little ball activates and expresses a glowing protein, its fluorescence proving that life and art can harmonize into a very different third thing, as willing to please as it is to protect. Woven into lattices made of flexible natural materials that promote airflow and moisture, the granules form eye-catching interior design elements that could one day keep us healthy.

“We visualize them as sensors,” explains Mogas-Soldevila. “They can detect pathogens, such as bacteria or viruses, or alert people to toxins within their home. The pellets are designed to interact with air. With development, they could monitor or even clean it.”

For now, they shine, a triumphant first stop on the team’s roadmap to the future. The fluorescence establishes that the lab’s biomaterial manufacturing process is compatible with cutting-edge cell-free engineering that gives the pellets their real properties.

A rapidly expanding technology, cell-free protein expression systems allow researchers to make proteins without the use of living cells.

Gabrielle Ho, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Bioengineering and co-leader of the project, she explains how the team’s design work came to be cell-free, a technique rarely explored outside of laboratory study or medical applications.

“Normally, we would use living E.coli cells to make a protein,” says Ho. “E.coli it is a biological workhorse, accessible and very productive. We would introduce DNA into the cell to encourage the expression of specific proteins. But this traditional method was not an option for this project. you can’t have designed E.coli hanging on your walls.”

Cell-free systems contain all the components that a living cell requires to make proteins (energy, enzymes, and amino acids) and not much else. Therefore, these systems are not alive. They do not replicate, and they cannot cause infection either. They are “living-like,” designed to take up DNA and expel proteins in ways previously only possible using living cells.

“One of the best things about these materials not being alive,” says Mogas-Soldevila, “is that we don’t have to worry about keeping them that way.”

Unlike living cells, cell-free materials do not require a humid environment or constant monitoring in a laboratory. The team’s research has established a process for making these dry pellets that retains bioactivity during manufacturing, storage, and use.

Bioactive, expressive and programmable, this technology is designed to capitalize on the unique properties of organic materials.

Mogas-Soldevila, whose lab focuses exclusively on biodegradable architecture, understands the value of biomaterials as both environmentally responsible and aesthetically rich.

“Architects are realizing that conventional materials (concrete, steel, glass, ceramics, etc.) are harmful to the environment and are increasingly interested in alternatives to replace at least some of them. Due to that we use a lot, even being able to replace a small percentage would translate into a significant reduction in waste and pollution.”

His lab’s signature materials—biopolymers made from shrimp shells, wood pulp, sand and soil, silk cocoons, and algae gums—provide qualities beyond their sustainable advantages.

“My obsession is diagnosis, but my passion is the game,” says Mogas-Soldevila. “Biomaterials are the only materials that can encapsulate this dual function observed in nature.”

This multi-faceted approach benefited from the help of Penn Engineering’s George H. Stephenson Foundation Bio-MakerSpace and Educational Laboratory, and the support of its director, Sevile Mannickarottu. In addition to contributing essential equipment and research infrastructure to the team, Mannickarottu was instrumental in enabling the interdisciplinary relationships that led to the team’s success, introducing Ho to DumoLab Research team collaborators. These include Mogas-Soldevila, Camila Irabien, a Penn biology student who made crucial contributions to the experimental work, and Fulbright design scholar Vlasta Kubušová, who co-directed the project during her time at Penn and who will continue to drive future projects. project steps.

Cell-free design and manufacturing research required unique dialogues between science and art, categories that Ho believed were completely separate before embarking on this project.

“I learned a lot from the approach that the designers brought to the lab,” says Ho. “Usually in science, we have a specific problem or a hypothesis that we work on systematically.”

But in this collaboration, things were different. Open. The team searched for a live platform that would detect and inform people about interactive matter. They needed to explore, step by step, how to get there.

“Design is only limited by imagination. We looked for a technology that could help build a vision, and it turned out to be cell-free,” says Ho.

“For my part,” says Mogas-Soldevila, “it was inspiring to witness the rigor and attention to limitations that bioengineering brings.”

The limitations were many: machine limitations, biological limitations, financial limitations, and space limitations.

“But while we kept these restrictions in place,” he continues, “we asked our most pressing creative questions. Can the materials warn us of unseen threats? How will humans react to these bioactive sites? Will they be beautiful? Will they be strange? What is more important, will they enable a new aesthetic relationship with the potential of bioactive and biobased matter?

Down the road, cell-free granules and biopolymer networks could protectively coat our inner lives, nurturing our mental and physical health. For now, the research is ongoing, the poetry of design energized by constraint, the constraint of engineering energized by poetry.