Carbon nanotube based programmable bioactuator (BIONANOCAR consortium)

The objective of this project is to bridge the biological and non-biological fields to one another in a manner where signaling between them can take place in a controlled fashion in both directions.

The concept used in this project to reach this goal is based on a bioactuator consisting of graphene and/or carbon nanotubes  coupled to proteins that are the nano-scale molecular engines of biology. The proteins can be affected in a reversible manner to change their state, i.e. programmed, by an electric field emanating from the carbon nanostructure. If the concept will work efficiently, it will open new avenues for controlling the function of biological molecular engines in practical applications.

To carry out the project, we bridge expertise across traditional disciplines by uniting research groups ranging from pure physics to applied biosciences, and by merging experiments with theory and computational sciences. All the involved groups have background and on-going projects on similar research within the fields of physics, molecular electronics, biosciences, and computational biophysics, thus covering the wide knowledge needed for the research.