LILACS (Looking Inside Living Algal Cell Walls - A Soft Matter Approach)
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Liverpool
Department Name: Physics
Abstract
Marine organisms such as algae are remarkably versatile. Over a period of 1.5 billion years of evolution they have adapted themselves to virtually every ocean and freshwater ecosystem on the planet. Part of this adaptivity arises because they can deal with rapid and extreme changes in water salinity and hydrostatic pressure. This is made possible by their cell walls - soft materials with a fine and flexible polymeric microstructure. While much is known of how land plant cell walls adapt to their environments, little is known of the adaptability of marine cell walls. Yet this knowledge is essential for predicting how marine organisms will adapt to impending variations from climate change. It will also aid in the development of novel adaptive biomaterials that are derived from natural feedstocks. Achieving this demands answers to some fundamental scientific questions. How do marine cell walls structure themselves? How does this structure determine their material properties? How do these structures adapt to constantly changing environments? These questions remain essentially unanswered.
A prominent reason for this knowledge gap is that most investigations on marine cell walls have been carried out withinthe individual disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics. Bioscientists often characterise cell walls in terms of their evolution and composition, chemical scientists have focussed on optimal approaches to extract and refine cell walls and physicists have typically treated cell walls as ideal, unchanging materials with fixed mechanical properties. While such research has been insightful for understanding numerous individual aspects of cell walls, it has not led to a holistic and fundamental understanding of the dynamic complexity of the marine cell wall.
The LILACS consortium will address this through a unique approach that combines soft matter physics, molecular engineering, and cell biology. We will build on recent advances in rheology, imaging, and molecular design to constructmodel cell walls and mechanically probe them, while changing their environments. We will design molecular rotors, small fluorescent molecules that directly bind to marine cell walls and probe their local viscosity. Finally, we will develop novel approaches for in situ environmental control of both living and model cell walls in real time. We will recruit three cross-disciplinary researchers and place them at the core of the project decision-making, ensuring that LILACS is defined by its cross-disciplinary goals rather than the priorities of its individual research disciplines.
This is a speculative, early stage and high potential proposal because we aim to engineer novel molecular, rheological and microscopy tools to study the full material diversity of marine cell walls in response to ecologically relevant stresses. It will develop new experimental capabilities for interrogating living tissues. LILACS will have important impacts in material science and synthetic biology where there is a growing need to create environmentally adaptive synthetic materials. These outcomes demand the interdisciplinary collaborations such as ours and would be impossible without making significant experimental advances in each of our respective fields. Now is the time to join forces and enable these advances by working towards cross-disciplinary vision.
A prominent reason for this knowledge gap is that most investigations on marine cell walls have been carried out withinthe individual disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics. Bioscientists often characterise cell walls in terms of their evolution and composition, chemical scientists have focussed on optimal approaches to extract and refine cell walls and physicists have typically treated cell walls as ideal, unchanging materials with fixed mechanical properties. While such research has been insightful for understanding numerous individual aspects of cell walls, it has not led to a holistic and fundamental understanding of the dynamic complexity of the marine cell wall.
The LILACS consortium will address this through a unique approach that combines soft matter physics, molecular engineering, and cell biology. We will build on recent advances in rheology, imaging, and molecular design to constructmodel cell walls and mechanically probe them, while changing their environments. We will design molecular rotors, small fluorescent molecules that directly bind to marine cell walls and probe their local viscosity. Finally, we will develop novel approaches for in situ environmental control of both living and model cell walls in real time. We will recruit three cross-disciplinary researchers and place them at the core of the project decision-making, ensuring that LILACS is defined by its cross-disciplinary goals rather than the priorities of its individual research disciplines.
This is a speculative, early stage and high potential proposal because we aim to engineer novel molecular, rheological and microscopy tools to study the full material diversity of marine cell walls in response to ecologically relevant stresses. It will develop new experimental capabilities for interrogating living tissues. LILACS will have important impacts in material science and synthetic biology where there is a growing need to create environmentally adaptive synthetic materials. These outcomes demand the interdisciplinary collaborations such as ours and would be impossible without making significant experimental advances in each of our respective fields. Now is the time to join forces and enable these advances by working towards cross-disciplinary vision.
