0:04 Oh, there you go. Okay. All right. Hi everyone. My name is Georgia Kichi. I’m an assistant professor in school of architecture at Virginia Tech. I’ve been trained as both architect and bioengineer. And today I’m going to talk about how biology will build the next generation of construction materials. So I’m going to give you a little bit of background about myself so you get to understand how I get to do GMO for the build environment.

0:52 I start my career fostering partners and here you see a few buildings that I’ve been working on while I was there. That was almost 20 years exactly 20 years ago almost. Then I work also on u this beautiful project that you see on the left which is the aquatic center for the London Olympic Games project from Zah Hadid from the early 2000. And then I work also on a smaller company called SBI doing interior design.

1:20 When on the opposite spectrum I went working for this building which is a Singapore University of Design Technology a project for UN studio. And while this was of course incredibly fulfilling I was also painfully aware of this statistic of which I’m sure you’re familiar with. And so with some background in the building industry I could see three main problems. Materials that we use in in in in construction are not fit for their purpose.

1:49 Usually they’re not tunable and they’re resource intensive. And to that I could see two main solution. The first that by starting at the nano scale we can have greater control of the final product but also that by leveraging biological mechanism of material production we can highly reduce the energy expenditure of the materials we’re currently use. And here you have a clear example. One side you have a man-made ceramics.

2:15 That’s those are bricks being fired. And as you may know that’s a very energyintensive u method, right? We need to put ceramics in a thousand degrees for hours if not days. On the other side going back again to biology, you have coral, right? That’s a bioceramics that is produced at the fraction of the temperature, right? Is produced lower than room temperature because it’s a marine environment. It can sequester the CO2.

2:46 It has better mechanical performance for sure in toughness than the ceramics we’re using. It can selfheal and do all these different things that we cannot currently do do with the materials that we’re using in construction. So the real question is how does nature build materials? How does nature build in general? Well, the man you see here is Donberg. He’s the founder and director of the VC Institute for Biological Inspired Engineering at Harvard University where I did my thesis for my master in biology some years ago.

3:19 And this is a story he likes to tell. He’s he was a student in medicine at Harvard when he decided to take an elective in art. And for the first time he sees this tensic tree model that he he holds in his hand and he say oh wow this must be really the way that mleian cells are built and in fact you can see the similarities right and that was really cured by this but then was found to be true and a whole new field called mechano transduction came to life out of this observation and if you’re not familiar with mechano transduction that’s a part of biology that help us understand for instance how cancer develop in tissues was a very important part and so today I’m asking to do something very similar right don was looking at design as a way to understand biology today I’m asking you to look at biology as a way to design what about the other the other solution that are working at the nanoscale or start working from the nanoscale app right why do do we do that Well, because otherwise we would not have like I’m pretty sure you know that we would not have phones today’s that are so much more powerful than computer that send the man to the moon, right?

4:43 And in fact, that’s because right things I’m sure you know things like transistor that went go went from the centimeter scales down to the nanometer scales. And the smallest I could found was a 2 nanometer wide, which interestingly enough, at least for me, is the same thickness of a strand of DNA. And so, yes, we can build at the visible scale. We can build at the same scale of many biological processes.

5:08 Yet, the two are very different. And I believe that we have the tendency of thinking of life in terms of machines because machines are things that we know how to build, we know how to control, right? However, today we have at our disposal the same tools that nature has to build and that’s DNA, right? And so you might wonder as architect or designer, are you saying that as an architect and designer I’m supposed to build from the nanoscale app and what I’m supposed to use is biology?

5:41 And the answer is yes. Why? Well, because I I think that the bio engineering revolution, biology revolution that is happening right now can have potentially the same effect the robotic engineer and software engineer had on architecture maybe two decades ago, right? As designers, we didn’t participate in this revolution, this previous revolution passively. We actually embraced those tool made those tools our own as designer and architects and so today in fact I had I’m pretty sure there are people here that were the pioneer that did that right that did that loop and so if it took maybe for us what 10 years to really embrace this tool and become expert in in this in robotic engineering and software engineering.

6:38 It might take perhaps the same time for us to be able to design at all these scales and this time the tools we’re going to choose is by engineering and that is something that already happened in engineering. The tools that we are using in synthetic biology didn’t come out from nowhere, right? They come out from computer science. And so the difference is right we in one case we program inorganic matter and in the other we program organic matter we program life.

7:11 So how do we program a cell or organism. The process is quite similar extracting similar actually. You start with the output and here is a very simple task considering how many engineer actually doing this. Let’s say turning on a red LED in one case and for me it will be espresso red florescent protein. Now that you have the outcome you know which code you have to create right in one case is a series of zeros and ones in the other is a series of a t g and c which are nucleotides.

7:50 The code itself is not enough though, right? You need to have a logic, a logic one in one case. In biology, we use proteins, right? Repressor, right? Promoters and so on. And then we have to have the proper processor, right? A CPU in one case for me is a cell and sometimes actually a specific cell. And we’re going to see that in a moment. And if you program that properly, then you have the outcome that you want.

8:22 So what I do as a researcher I work with this relatively new field which is called engineer living materials. We see organisms as bofactories. These organisms can be different one bacteria, fungi, u plants, mamalia cells or a consortium of these which we use for different applications. Pioneer work was done by people working with therapeutics. In fact, one of the first product that was created using synthetic biology is insulin.

8:51 Insulin is produced by bacteria that were gen genetically modified to have right the genomic information the code for a specific protein which is human insulin. But here don’t produce any type of insulin. We make them produce insulin so that we can harvest this to use for therapeutic reasons. Other colleague of mine works with electronic and devices and machines. I’m an architect and therefore I’m interested in construction materials.

9:23 What sort of material can we create with this system? Well, because we have control over the self assembly of the material, right? We can actually have control of the mechanical properties of materials that we just saw in the talk. But we can also chemically functionize these materials to respond to certain specific environmental cues or we can actually have material that can self-repair. And so one of the project that I’m working on right now is trying to to answer this question.

9:58 Can we program grove to create complex geometry? Can we recreate this beautiful architecture from Shigurban? Not by assembling it, but by growing it. But also, if digital design has transformed the way we conceive geometry, can synthetic biology transform the way we fabricate it. And how? Well, we already doing it. We’ve been doing for quite some time. We just have better tools right now. So in fact all these vegetables you see in a thousand cultivated varieties are engineered for one single plant.

10:40 The plant that you see here on the side this little plant with these yellow flowers all of them right? And so if we do this for the sake of having something that looks pretty and is tasty and nutritious why not doing it for creating complex structure elements. How are we going to do that? Well, there are two mechanism that plants use for growth. One is photoropies, which is the ability of the plant to grow towards light and the other is gravitropies, which is the ability of the plant to sense what is up and what is down so that the shoot grows upwards and the root downwards.

11:26 Is this second mechanism that we’re going to use for this project. How does a plant sense gravity? Well, what you see here growing on the on the left is a root from a plant, a small plant called albidopsy italana, which is a plant a model for plant biologist. Other plant will be working just the same, slightly different the way they look. In the tip, at the tip of the root that you see here, there are cells that are called cola cells that sense gravity.

11:59 And they’re special specialized to do that. And they do that because inside they have these organels called status that you see here in black. You can imagine them as sort of rocks in a jar, right? In fact, when you turn the plant upside down, these rocks fall down because they follow gravity. And so exactly how does this work? Well, status right you have this is a cell right this fall down and the same is goes when they you rotate the plant right they activate a single pathway they culminate with the redistribution of oxyen oxin is a very important growth hormone in plants and in this case it reduce the capability or actually slow down the growth of the root and specifically where is present it will grow slower than the opposite side right and in fact I can show you here a video that shows exactly that right you have a root of a plant and let’s zoom in of the cells and you can clearly see the status now are on the corner right and so that’s activate a single pathway you will have more oxyen on this side than on the other side and so the top grow faster faster than the bottom and that’s how the plant bends.

13:32 What about making statute magnetic? If statalates these rocks right in a jar are the one decide how the oxyen is going to be redistributed then that means that if I get control of their position I can control where the plant is going to bend. So I can control the geometry while the plant is growing. How do we do that? Well, we have to go back to the slide with the right the programming.

14:06 In nature there are proteins that precipitate magnetite and therefore the idea is to express this protein in the statase in this rock in a jar, right? So that I can control then their position so that can control the growth of the plant. Now the code we said is not enough right? We have to have the logic system and the right processor right? If you remember those are different type of proteins and the processor is the right type of cell.

14:42 Now because this is an engineering problem and I have a full room of room full of engineers. But you already know that we need to validate each process. In bioengineering we usually use red flores or some kind of fluorescent protein to do that to validate each step. And so the first two steps which are can we express the protein in the right type of cell the right processor right the cola cells and the second one can we actually then bring this protein to be expressed in the light organels is done by first a red florescent protein in this case.

15:22 Then once we obtain we validate these two step we swap right the florescent protein for the protein the precipitate magnotide. Okay. So the first step is to understand if we can express protein in the right type of cells and that’s what you have here on the top you can see that’s overlay of a confocal where you can clearly see the roots and here you can see the fluorescent protein in the right type of cells.

15:50 Now we have to bring the referescent protein not just in in the right type of cell but in the type right type of organel the statistit those rocks because it takes some times to transform a plant. We do this force in cells also because we need to test many different signal peptides. And so Alex Harris who is a PhD student that did all these fantastic work came out with these eight different signal peptides right of which actually four work and here you see the results right these are the single cells the top one are the one that did not work in fact you can see the reference being expressed everywhere in the cell the bottom one are the one that work and you can see there are collocicalized with a start.

16:50 Okay, that’s great. We were actually hoping for just one. It’s really great news. We have four and working with biology, you never know what you going to get because sometimes biology doesn’t really want to cooperate. Now, we have to now we have these four signal peptides. They work in cells. We have to validate if we can actually do this in plants, right? And and so we transformed the plants with the signal peptides and these are actually results from three weeks ago I think.

17:19 What you can clearly see while here is your overlay right and then the green channel is for the cell and red is for the stats and in the confocal stack the 3D stack you can clearly see that the stats are actually red which means that the the fluorescent protein is actually inside the organal which is great. What is next? Now this is actually very recent. The next step is what we’re doing right now.

17:50 Swapping this reference for this protein that can precipitate magnotite. Now that sounds very simple but it’s not. You need to have sort of condition. You have to have very low oxygen level otherwise you get some other kind of iron oxide. You need to have a certain percentage of iron 2 iron 3. You need to have a different in pH. But we’ve been lucky so far and we are hoping to get keep being lucky.

18:18 What certain things can we do? Well, there are few things two that I want to describe today. Well, first of all, going back to the Shigurban architecture, the idea is that you can control right how the the plant bends and so you can control the geometry. But another thing that I actually we’re also excited about is u the idea of growing crops in space. Now with no gravity a plant doesn’t know which way is up and down.

18:49 So far we’ve been using photoropies which is the other capability of the plant to other mechanism the plant use for growth. But a plant really needs a proper root system and so this might actually be helpful. Right. So to have basically replacing with magnetic field, gravitational field I’m going to conclude with first thanking everyone involved. First of all my collaborator professor Bastian Barman at the school of plant environmental science of Virginia Tech and a special thank really goes to Alex who did a fantastic job in the lab and of course the people that actually believe in us and gave us the funding little less than a year ago the Institute for Creativity Arts and Technology otherwise called IAT and the Susan Duncan Innovation Agriculture CR and because I’m the last one I’m going to conclude with this slide.

19:46 Just to wrap up on what the fantastic things that we we see today. Thank you so much Dan for organizing this amazing conference and thank you all for listening. Thanks. Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you for your time.