Ardemis Boghossian wins ERC Starting Grant
The ERC Starting Grants are given each year to researchers of any nationality and in any field of research with 2-7 years of research experience after the completion of their PhD and who show a promising scientific track record, and offer an excellent research proposal. Application must come from an EU or associated country, and each Starting Grant can be up to €1.5 million given over a period of five years, with an additional €1 million to cover specific “start-up” costs.
This year, Ardemis Boghossian (EPFL Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering) has received a Starting Grant for her project: “A Synthetic Biology Approach to Developing Optical NanoAnalytics”. Boghossian’s research takes a highly interdisciplinary approach to address fundamental challenges and develop novel technologies that exploit the synergy between nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Focusing on optoelectronics and protein engineering, Boghossian’s work contributes new biological and biochemical methods for the production of durable hybrid nanomaterials for energy and biosensing applications.
“This project is really about blurring the lines between the living and non-living worlds to create new possibilities,” says Boghossian. “We use bioengineering to discover new synthetic materials and devices, and this opens up a whole new domain that was previously inaccessible. The possibilities are, even in the statistical sense, unquantifiably limitless!”
Bioengineering is the synthetic biologist’s approach to engineering materials. It allows researchers to overcome billions of years of evolution to create unnatural biomolecules equipped with interactions unfounded in nature. Biomolecules offer unparalleled molecular recognition that can be tuned by engineers to create highly specific sensors.
Unfortunately, biology has its limits; many biological optical sensors rely on fluorophores with limited lifetimes and visible emissions that overlap with tissue absorption. Unlike these fluorophores, single-walled carbon nanotubes benefit from fluorescence that is indefinitely photostable, demonstrating sensitivities that can detect analytes down to the single molecule. Their near-infrared wavelengths are also transparent to tissue absorption, allowing for continuous in vivo sensing. Unfortunately, these nanomaterials lack the molecular recognition biology has to offer.
In a sense, the advantages and disadvantages posed by the fields of bio- and nano-materials engineering are highly complementary. This proposal envisions a new generation of NanoBiOptic devices – devices that exploit the synergy of nano-bio hybrids – for sensing applications.
We aim to bring to the nanosensor community what directed evolution has brought to chemistry; a guided approach to tuning interactions. We apply bioengineering techniques, such as artificial nucleic acid design as well as directed evolution, to circumvent current limitations in engineering nanosensors.
In demonstrating these techniques, we realize previously intractable optical platforms for bioanalyte detection, as well as a single-molecule basis for imaging DNA-protein interactions, such as those found in CRISPR. Synthetic biology thus has the potential to complement the physical sciences in the engineering of new synthetic optical platforms, enabling a “revolution through evolution” of synthetic nanomaterials.