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Mimicking Natural Systems
New Nanotechnologies for Space Exploration
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| CMISE directors Chih-Ming
Ho (center) and Carlo Montemagno (left) with several of the
engineering faculty affiliated with the Institute. (l to r)
Bruce Dunn, Ming Wu, and James Liao. (Not pictured: C.-J.
Kim, Jack Judy, and Xiang Zhang.) |
By Marlys Amundson and Christopher
Sutton
By mimicking the remarkable self-organizing capabilities of natural biological
systems, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at UCLA hopes to create the
next generation of technologies for exploring space.
The NASA-sponsored Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration (CMISE) will
receive up to $40 million over the next 10 years. CMISE is one of five University
Research, Engineering and Technology Institutes established this year; institutes
that represent NASA's grand vision for enabling the promise of 21st-century technologies.
"Biological systems have acquired an amazing ability to manage information on
multiple levels - organizing themselves into increasingly complex structures,
from tissues to organs to complex human biological systems," says Chih-Ming Ho,
associate vice chancellor for research and CMISE director. "Our strategy is to
mimic the cell's information-processing abilities to establish a model for space
system design that will redefine space exploration technology."
Beginning at the single-cell level, biological systems consist of increasingly
complex levels of organization. How behavior at one level influences the next,
and what information is passed on from level to level are issues that CMISE researchers
want to examine - and mimic.
Carlo Montemagno, chair of the Bioengineering Department and co-director of the
Institute, notes, "Biological systems are an ideal place to look at the integrated
organization of system functions and information at multiple levels. Biological
systems are the original nanotechnologists. If we achieve what I believe is possible,
it will open an entirely new window for engineering new materials, instruments,
and devices. Researchers within CMISE are developing transcendent applications
that will serve the development of new platform technologies. I am especially
interested in emergent intelligences - complex systems coming together to perform
organizational tasks that you do not normally engineer."
The new Institute brings together scientists from UCLA's engineering and medical
schools, the physical and life sciences, and leading researchers from Caltech,
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Arizona State University. Many of the faculty
members have long collaborated on cross-disciplinary research, and will have
the opportunity to build on their work through the Institute.
The integrated environment will benefit CMISE researchers and their work. "That's
how the world really is - biological systems make no distinctions between chemistry,
biology or physics," comments Montemagno.
As UCLA engineering faculty members began working more with researchers in the
physical sciences, they noticed that a cell - a compact natural system - is a
complete factory the size of microns. With a rich research history in aero- and
astronautics, it made sense for them to consider developing applications for
space exploration that mimic natural systems.
Research in the Institute will focus on the development of systems that use nanoscale
sensors, actuators, and energy sources to mimic a cellular system. The researchers
will also develop multi-scale information processing techniques, and test the
systems on satellites to see how they operate in space. The focus is broken down
into four Internal Research Groups (IRG): Energetics, Metabolics, Systematics,
and Satellites.
The Energetics group, led by chemistry professor Fraser Stoddart, will be developing
new energy transduction systems using nanotechnology. One of their goals is to
create a biometric version of a solar cell, harvesting light for energy through
manipulation of motor-molecules and molecular machineries that imitate cellular
functions.
"We're borrowing the concepts of molecular recognition and self-assembly from
nature to design and construct fully artificial nanosystems that can interconvert
one kind of energy with another - light into mechanical, for instance," explains
Stoddart.
The focus of the Metabolics IRG will be on metabolic regulation, and how the
cells control these activities at various levels. The results of their work will
be used in managing an astronaut's health, and in general engineering principles
for the design of a space ship.
"We will use nanotechnologies and informatics and build on the team's medical
experience to devise ways to redesign intracellular control for a specific purpose," explains
chemical engineering professor James Liao, who will lead the group. "We will
be engineering intracellular circuits for sensing, diagnosis, and drug delivery."
The Systematics IRG will concentrate on artificially mimicking a cell's function
on a chip. They will use the research findings from the Energetics and Metabolic
IRGs, and determine an efficient way to move cells and liquids without human
intervention.
"We will have to determine how to control sensing and other functions," notes
C.-J. Kim, leader of the Systematics group and a professor of mechanical and
aerospace engineering. "We will also have to ensure that the devices are not
so sensitive that they won't function if changes need to be made based on the
work of the other groups within CMISE."
Some of the transducers the Systematics team will use have already been developed,
tested, and proven successful by UCLA researchers. In addition to advancing current
technologies, the team will also develop completely new transducers as they better
understand a cell's functions.
"Not only will we be able to make things happen by mimicking a cell's behavior," explains
Kim, "but we will come to a better understanding of how a cell works by trying
to do what it does. We will discover how cells - which are localized and of low-complexity
- can collectively do intelligent things."
Professor Helen Reed, a researcher at Arizona State University, will test the
devices and systems in space through a micro-satellite program that she leads.
"The UCLA microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) group is one of the top in the
world, and CMISE brings in researchers in the physical sciences and medicine
who are also leading researchers their fields," notes Ho. "All of the faculty
involved in CMISE have worked together and have solid track records of making
scientific dreams a reality."
Researchers at UCLA formed one of the first research programs in MEMS, which
has been recently extended to investigation of nanoelectromechanical systems
(NEMS) and bio-NEMS. The components in these devices are billionths of a meter
in size, with the ability to self-assemble the way nature assembles molecules
and other nanoscale components.
Two-thirds of the professors affiliated with CMISE are also involved in the California
NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), a joint enterprise of UCLA and UC Santa Barbara.
Stoddart, the acting CO-director of CNSI, finds the NASA grant extraordinarily
exciting. He sees CMISE as a role model, demonstrating the truly innovative research
that can be done in this field.
UCLA researchers will be able to leverage the resources of both Institutes -
the space and facilities provided by CNSI and the research funding from CMISE.
"The infrastructure at UCLA and long-term funding from NASA create a foundation
for greater risk-taking and more innovative research opportunities," explains
Vijay K. Dhir, interim dean of the School. "It's an opportunity for our researchers
to work together on truly innovative concepts that do not normally receive long-term
funding."
Adds Liao, "The CMISE interdisciplinary team will create something extraordinary
- something beyond what any single discipline could create."
Other UCLA engineering professors involved in the Institute include Bruce Dunn,
chemical engineering; Jack Judy and Ming Wu, electrical engineering; and Xiang
Zhang, mechanical and aerospace engineering. The new Institute already has strong
corporate support.
Companies such as Intel, Rockwell Scientific, Boeing, and Amgen are interested
in the technologies that will be developed at the Institute, proven technologies
that will enable engineering of complex systems.
UCLA students from a number of disciplines will be involved in the Institute
as well. Graduate and undergraduate students will have the opportunity to conduct
research associated with the Institute's goals, and take interdisciplinary courses
that will provide them with a solid understanding of the underlying concepts.
For additional information on CMISE, please visit http://www.cmise.ucla.edu.
Photo credit: Scott Quintard,
UCLA Photography |
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