Chemistry Seminar Series: Bottom-up, Low-Cost Designs for Biosensing and Manufacturing

Biographical Information

Prof. Stoyan Smoukov is a Professor at Queen Mary University of London and led the Active & Intelligent Materials lab 2012-2017 at the University of Cambridge. He has published 96 journal papers, cited over 4200 times, with H-index of 35, co-founded a startup company, and is leading the work on a number of European and EPSRC projects. Current research focused is on the fundamentals phase transitions in confinement, geometry in materials, and bottom-up growth of structures without lithography. Longer goals are understanding fundamentals of minimal synthetic life, as well as practical growth autonomous material robotics.

Abstract

We study the fundamentals of living processes, as there is plenty to learn from life both about sustainability and cost/resource efficiency. We show how we can design a whole lab for COVID tests for $51. It is as sensitive as the PCR tests and all fits in a small backpack.[1] But using biology alone restricts us to temperature and other conditions for maintaining life. There are just as many opportunities in bottom-up designs of abiotic processes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to replicate functions of life in minimal, understandable systems? Could we make them even more robust than in biology? From advances in the field, it is likely in the next several decades we will all witness a second origin of life (abiogenesis), based on full(er) understanding of minimal chemical systems, with numerous applications in the meantime. On the road to such a lofty goal, we have pioneered inter-penetration of materials for multi-functionality[2], which surprisingly led to novel supercapacitor architectures[3] and to moving and self-sensing materials.[4] Based the unexpected self-shaping of emulsion droplets from cooling[5], we discovered artificial morphogenesis and harnessed it to grow complex, regular geometric structures, including from polymers[6], sustainably as in nature, but without lithography. Thermodynamic, mathematical, and molecular dynamic modelling [7] allow us to probe the molecular physics and combined with synchrotron X-ray radiation we have identified the first fully determined unit cell structure of a rotator phase 8]. Such insights into the process allow biological-like multiplication and efficiency on the nanoscale for non-biological industrial designs. E.g. in mechanically splitting droplets to produce nanomulsions usually >99.99% of the energy is wasted. But we can get droplets (similarly to living things) to harness the energy from environmental fluctuations and split themselves like cells during replication.[9] We also grow synthetic invisible robots, but instead of thousands to millions of components, we use only two. And 1,000,000 robots can cost as little as £0.01-0.02.[10] We have summarised achievements in such bottom-up systems in a chapter together with other leading bottom-up synthetic biologists in a book on models of the origin of life.[11]

References

[1] Lin E, Razzaque UA, Burrows SA, Smoukov SK*, End-to-end system for rapid and sensitive early-detection of SARS-CoV-2 for resource-poor and field-test environments using a $51 lab-in-a-backpack. PLoS ONE, 17, e0259886 (2022), DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259886
[2] Khaldi A, Plesse C, Vidal F, Smoukov SK*, Designing Smarter Materials with Interpenetrating Polymer Networks, Adv. Mater. 27, 4418–4422 (2015)
[3] Fong KD, Smoukov SK*, et al. Semi-Interpenetrating Polymer Networks for Enhanced Supercapacitor Electrodes, ACS Energy Lett. 2, 2014–2020 (2017)
[4] Wang T, Smoukov SK*, et al. Electroactive Polymers for Sensing, Interface Focus 6, 20160026 (2016)
[5] Denkov N, Tcholakova S, Lesov I, Cholakova D, Smoukov SK*,Self-Shaping of Droplets via Formation of Intermediate Rotator Phases on Cooling, Nature 528, 392–395 (2015)
[6] Lesov I, Smoukov SK*, et al, Bottom-up Synthesis of Polymeric Micro- and Nanoparticles with Regular Anisotropic Shapes, Macromolecules 51 (19), 7456-7462 (2018)
[7] Burrows, SA, Korotkin, I, Smoukov SK*, Boek, E, Karabasov S, Benchmarking of molecular dynamics force fields for solid-liquid and solid-solid phase transitions in alkanes, J. Phys Chem B 125 (19), 5145–5159 (2021), DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.0c07587
[8] Burrows, SA, Smoukov, SK et al. Structure of the Hexadecane Rotator Phase… J Phys Chem B, in press, (2023) DOI:10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c02027
[9] Tcholakova S, Valkova Zh, Cholakova D, Vinarov Z, Lesov I, Denkov N, Smoukov SK*, Efficient self-emulsification via cooling-heating cycles, Nature Comm., 8, 15012 (2017)
[10] Cholakova D, Smoukov SK*, et al., Rechargeable self-assembled droplet microswimmers driven by surface phase transitions, Nature Phys. 17, 1050–1055 (2021)
[11] Ivanov I, Smoukov SK, Nourafkan E, Landfester K, Schwille P, Origin of life from a maker’s perspective (2022) https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07225

Also Ch. 12 in Conflicting Models for the Origin of Life, (2023) Smoukov SK, Gordon R, Seckbach J, Eds., https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119555568.ch12