NANOMEMBRANE

Topics: biological energy transfer, nano-engineering, membrane protein organization
Disciplinary fields: biology, chemistry, materials science, physics
Summary: The direct objectives of this project are two fold: on the one hand to understand biological energy transfer, in one, two and three dimensions; on the other hand to develop technology for the one, two and three dimensional engineering of soft-matter and in particular membrane protein organization. Photosynthetic energy transfer has been studied for many years using increasingly sophisticated techniques on isolated or reconstituted systems. Part of this project hopes to go further by constructing novel architectures so new questions can be posed such as the role of high-level nm to μm scale organization on function. Furthermore, it recently became clear that non-trivial quantum processes were playing a role even at room temperature in light capture and transport. Some of the samples proposed to be studied will help clarify the extent and significance of these processes.
The proposal is to construct and structurally characterize novel objects using structural DNA based nano-engineering. Knowledge of the energy flow and the architecture allows to test different hypotheses explaining light-harvesting system function, and to test the limits of quantum effects in these systems, and design new systems.
Project Interlocutor: James Sturgis, LISM (UMR 7255)
Project duration : 03/01/2018- 02/28/2021
Call for application: Interdisciplinarité 2016
Photography credits: Photo by Thomas Somme on Unsplash