21ENGBIO: Engineering Biology to Scale-Up Biomanufacturing of Novel Optical Materials

Humankind is visual animal. We perceive, we learn, we remember, all mediated by the way light interacts with matter to transmit information to our brains. Many of our greatest technological advances, driving the most profound societal changes, have been sparked by the way we generate and record light; from light bulbs to LEDs, from photographic film to Tiktok (TM), innovation is constant.

But one thing hasn't changed - the palette of materials which we can use to manage light has not experienced any significant innovation since the commercialisation of Perspex... the available optical materials library is a small bookshelf. Reflection, refraction, diffraction, interference, and many more - a huge array of vital properties all dictated by the shaping of lumps from a few types of material.

Our research will bring to life a new class of optical materials. New but not novel, these materials were first dreamt about over 100 years ago. They became lab curiosities 10 years ago but fabrication has been limited to tiny quantities not useful for real-world application. Engineering Biology has given us the ability to harness the exquisite atomistic compilation of matter that nature delivers trivially all around us. By programming bacteria to synthesise the components of these to revolutionary optical materials we can overcome the manufacturing barrier. Created by the billion, at low cost, and in an environmentally friendly manner, our bio-built materials combine the impossibly small and the infeasibly multitudinous, delivering access to materials possessing the exact optical properties we specify.

A great variety of products that use light will be fundamentally impacted by this step-change in the optical materials palette enabled by this technology. Smaller, lighter optical components will allow phones to become thinner, drones/microsatellites to become more capable, and medical probe cameras to be less intrusive. But these materials will also impact non-imaging applications such as in communication using fibre optics, in energy generation using solar panels, in sensors monitoring environmental change and so on. These materials will change the way we look at the world and the way the world looks.

The concept of artificial electromagnetic materials was conceived over 100 years ago. Such materials have become commonplace for long wavelengths but in the optical regime they remain lab curiosities. This is attributable to the lack of technologies capable of mass producing the necessary nanoscale (~10nm) functional geometries required for wavelengths under a micron.
This proposal will develop the means to manufacture the necessary elements, by harnessing Nature's manufacturing capacity. DNA origami will be used to self-assemble "meta-atoms", and further assemble them into macro scale 2D sheets, which will be decorated with metallic nano-objects to render them appropriately susceptible to electromagnetic waves in the optical regime. High throughput synthesis of the ssDNA (both scaffold and staple) needed to fabricate the meta-atoms can be achieved in E.coli using batch-fed bioreactors by adapting the approach of Praetorius et al. (Nature 2017). A key area for creation of IP will be in developing technologies and procedures to drive self-assembly efficiency up to a point at which it becomes commercially viable. We will demonstrate bioproduction of novel functional materials, namely artificial thin films
with custom-designed optical characteristics. The hugely attractive properties that can be engineered into these artificial electromagnetic materials promises disruptive impact in many market segments: mobile phone cameras, UAV/microsatellite imaging, medical probe cameras, body/ surveillance cameras etc. The technology will also possess significant trickle-down impact into other segments that exploit the EM spectrum including light-based communication (optical fibres/waveguides), pigments/colourants, sensor technologies and so forth.