Looking inside living algal cell walls: a soft matter approach (LILACS project)
The cell wall of marine organisms is a remarkable living material. It can constantly adapt to extreme environmental changes and has multifunctional properties that have been used for raw materials for the past 10,000 years.
Today, they’re essential ingredients in food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical products, and utilised abundantly within the biotechnology industry. Despite this widespread utility, our understanding of this extraordinary soft material remains relatively low.
Rapid changes to global ecosystems from climate change means that now is the time that we must expand our understanding of how cell walls respond to new environments, while also accelerating the development adaptive biomaterials from natural feedstocks.
Challenge
Extensive research has already investigated marine cell walls within bioscience, chemical science and physics which provides a solid foundational understanding of cell wall physiology, composition, genetics and mechanics. Therefore, we now understand the enormous potential for creating new bioinspired sustainable materials for health, world economies and the environment.
We must now fulfil this unmet potential by developing a comprehensive, holistic understanding of how marine cell walls structure themselves, how this restructuring informs their material properties and how these properties adapt to constantly changing environments.
Solution
The LILACS project will combine existing disciplinary expertise on the composition, material properties and stimuli-responsive nature of marine cell walls into a cross-disciplinary approach that interrogates their dynamic material properties.
By focusing on a particular marine macroalga, Ulva (green seaweed), this work will explore the structure and adaptability of marine biopolymers, specifically how they function under the varying conditions of the intertidal zone. This could shed light on the broader diversity of soft biological materials found in organisms such as eubacteria, archaea, plants, and algae. Each of these cell walls has evolved to function optimally in distinct environments, showcasing nature’s potential to inspire advanced materials for human use.
The vision underpinning LILACS is to explore how the heterogeneous carbohydrate polymers that make up marine cell walls create unique material behaviours. To do this, we build model cell wall hydrogels, informed by our perspectives from materials physics, chemistry and biology.
Collaborating with experts from Imperial College London and Durham University, novel so-called molecular rotors will be developed that can probe the local viscosity of living marine cell walls. This will enable us, for the first time, to probe the viscosity of living cell walls, which will be combined with advanced microscopy instrumentation and environmental chambers to shed light on how these cell walls change their structure and material properties under changing chemical and physical environments. By doing so, we will then be able to how marine-adapted cell wall polymers associate in real cells and real time.
Impact
This research holds the potential to leverage the unique, adaptable cell walls of marine organisms to address challenges in evolutionary biology, environmental sustainability, and economic development.
The study will enhance our understanding of cell walls which is also relevant for ecologically significant red and brown algae, whose polysaccharides (like carrageenans, agars, and alginates) support local economies in climate-vulnerable regions. Understanding and supporting these algae may help preserve ecosystems and benefit communities that depend on them.
Developing novel biopolymers from marine-adapted cell walls could lead to innovative products in various industries, including food packaging, medical devices, and sustainable materials. For instance, improved extraction and formulation methods for these biopolymers may make them suitable for use as biodegradable packaging or as components in medical applications.
By introducing new tools like molecular fluorescent rotors, the project aims to open new avenues in plant biology and soft matter physics, potentially broadening research on non-model organisms. This could pave the way for discoveries in the biological and physical sciences, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of plant and algal biology.
The stress-induced self-organization seen in marine cell walls offers a blueprint for developing bio-inspired composites. This could lead to advancements in materials science, where researchers can mimic nature’s structural adaptations to create strong, flexible, and resilient materials for diverse applications.
Project lead: Dr Anders Aufderhorst-Roberts
Dr Anders Aufderhorst-Roberts is a Lecturer in Sustainable and Biological Materials at the University of Liverpool and a Visiting Fellow at Durham University. His research group is focused on the use and development of experimental tools to characterise soft and biological materials during in-situ changes in chemical and mechanical environments.
His PhD at the University of Cambridge in the group of Athene Donald investigated the self-assembly of small molecules for food and personal care applications, in collaboration with Unilever R&D. His subsequent postdoctoral experience at the University of Leeds and at AMOLF, in the Netherlands focussed on materials characterisation of biological and bioinspired materials.
His group’s research focus is broad, encompassing both fundamental material science, formulation, and biological materials research with diverse funding that spans industry, government, and charitable foundations.