Winter Quarter Recap: Advancements at Pritzker Molecular Engineering
In case you missed any of the recent headlines from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, here are some of the latest breakthroughs that happened during our Winter Quarter.
New research unites quantum engineering and artificial intelligence
But two words have never been applied to this groundbreaking technology: Cheap or sustainable.
In a paper published this month in Nature Communications, An interdisciplinary research team showed how incorporating quantum computing into the classical machine-learning process can potentially help make machine learning more sustainable and efficient.
“Pluripotent” plastic: from one starting polymer, many materials
Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have developed a material which they call a “pluripotent plastic.” Like pluripotent stem cells which can give rise to any type of adult cell in the human body, their plastic, described in the journal Science, can take on many final forms.
“We believe, this is the first example of a synthetic material that exhibits pluripotent behavior,” said Stuart Rowan, the Barry L. MacLean Professor for Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise at PME and senior author of the new work. “We believe that it paves the way toward a different way of thinking about material design.”
Authorized in the “CHIPS and Science Act of 2022,” the NSF Engines program is designed to support the development of diverse regional coalitions of universities, local governments, the private sector and nonprofits to create solutions to today’s pressing issues.
For Junhong Chen, Crown Family Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and Lead Water Strategist at Argonne National Laboratory, the announcement is the culmination of years of effort – and the promise of years more important work ahead on a critical task. Chen is the co-Principal Investigator and Use-Inspired R&D Lead for Great Lakes ReNEW.
Pengju Li is part of an impressively interdisciplinary group of UChicago researchers in the Tian Lab that has created a new silicon-based device – a thin film 100 times lighter than facial tissue – to restart and control heartbeats with the gentle flashing of light. The group also has invented a new, minimally invasive endoscopic procedure to apply the device to the heart’s surface.
“Pengju has innovated a method using physical chemistry measurement techniques to visualize photoelectrochemical current dynamics over a device surface through a patch clamp setup,” said UChicago Chemistry Prof. Bozhi Tian. “Traditionally used by neuroscientists for electrophysiology, Pengju's adaptation of this precise tool for 3D materials property mapping is a breakthrough.”
“The point of these films is to demystify science and make it more relatable to everyone,” STAGE Lab’s founding director and PME professor Nancy Kawalek told a crowd gathered in ERC 161 on Jan. 9 for a special sneak peek of Serendipity. “Most scientists don’t realize how difficult it is to understand their work. The way to capture the public’s interest is to engage them emotionally, which is what these films do.”
Translating the structure of plastics to the language of computers
Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago have created a tool that lets them represent collections of long, complex polymers in representations that can be easily processed by computers and artificial intelligence programs.
“This is an exciting step toward being able to streamline the process of new polymer development,” said Juan de Pablo, Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and senior author of the new work, published in Digital Discovery. “If we want to solve some of the biggest engineering challenges in the world today, we need to be able to design new polymers more quickly.”
The tool, called Generative Big Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System, or G-BigSMILES, is openly available to the research community.
Spinning, magnetic micro-robots help researchers probe immune cell recognition
Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago have engineered tiny, spinning micro-robots that bind to immune cells to probe their function. The robot, or “hexapod,” gives scientists a new, highly adaptable way to study immune cells and to aid in the design of immunotherapies against cancer, infection, or autoimmune diseases.
Each hexapod robot has six arms containing molecules that might be recognized as foreign by the immune system — such as protein fragments from a tumor, virus, or bacterium. Researchers can use the hexapods to scan large collections of immune cells and discover which immune cells bind the foreign molecules of interest and how the hexapods’ movements impact that binding.
UChicago immunoengineering researchers decode the “cytokine storm” in sepsis
To better understand sepsis and the role of cytokines, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) researchers measured gene expression across tissues and organs affected by sepsis in a mouse model. They then measured how those same tissues were affected by pairs of cytokines. This work was led by Michihiro Takahama, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Chevrier lab who is now an Assistant Professor at Osaka University in Japan.
Surprisingly, they found that three cytokine pairs were responsible for most of the body’s damaging response to sepsis.
“We created the first organism-wide map of the effect of sepsis which uncovered a hierarchy within the cytokine storm,” said Asst. Prof. Nicolas Chevrier, co-author of the research. “And despite the chaotic nature of the storm, the rule that can explain this chaos turned out to be much simpler than we thought.”
