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IBEC Seminar: Pavan Kumar Bosukonda
Friday, December 15, 2023 @ 2:00 pm–3:00 pm
Smart artificial microcompartments: motility and communication
Pavan Kumar Bosukonda, Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
Nature is a continuous source of inspiration for the design of smart and intelligent materials. In particular, cells which are the building blocks of life display a complex symphony of various chemical/physical processes which make “life” possible and give it the characteristics which enable life to flourish and sustain. The topology of control systems in place within living cells offer many lessons in design of smart artificial microcompartments or microbots. In this talk, I will be discussing examples of microcompartments which are capable of smart adaptive motility, self-assembly and chemical-mediated communication with each other. We use simple buoyancy forces to regulate movement of our microcapsules and use antagonistic control to design relatively complex autonomous behavior by employing stratified chemical environments. The motile microcapsules can turn on/off chemical reactions and carry out logistics of molecular cargo. Also, I will discuss how we can use the combination of a stimuli responsive hydrogel and stratified environments to design a chemo-mechanical oscillator. Another focus will be our results on multiphase coacervates and how they formulate a pathway for self-assembly of microdroplets into clusters or tissue-like structures and trigger chemical communication between them.
Brief Bio: Dr. Pavan Kumar Bosukonda is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. He carried out his doctoral studies at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, in the field of porous materials wherein his specific interest was to use supramolecular strategies for pore engineering in mesoporous silica. After completing his Ph.D. in 2015, he moved to the University of Bristol, UK, to work with Prof. Stephen Mann as a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the field of protocells. His current research interests are focused on developing strategies to fabricate motile microcompartments, study of multiphase dynamics in liquid-liquid phase separation and designing strategies for regulating chemical communication between microcompartments.
