The engineering of protein-based biomaterials often requires both the production of protein materials and the high throughput screening for their mechanical properties. However, the mounting demand for high throughput mechanical testing is unfulfilled by the limited throughput of the current techniques. Moreover, high-throughput mechanical testing is generally desirable to expedite materials science research in both assisting in novel materials discovery and developing predictive with techniques such as machine learning. An inherent challenge with developing these assays is to produce and prepare testing samples in high throughput and apply a homogenous mechanical probing force for characterization. The equipment costs and instrument limitations of the existing methods also prohibit the widespread generation of large material property datasets. We address this problem by developing a high throughput adhesive biomaterial proteins screening platform that couples high throughput biomaterial protein production in the well-plate setting with a high-throughput colorimetric method for testing mechanical adhesion. We utilize a stimulus-responsive tag to enable the production of adhesive proteins in high titer, high purity, and high throughput without using a costly affinity column. The purified biomaterials are subjected to the centrifugal adhesion testing method we created using a common laboratory centrifuge, multi-well plates, and microparticles. The technique applies a homogenous centrifugal detachment force across the samples in the multi-well plate. Our centrifugal adhesion testing method can differentiate soft material films with variable adhesion strengths and shows excellent agreement with the well-known probe tack adhesion test. We can achieve a throughput of thousands of samples per run and are limited only by the number of wells in the plates. With its simplicity, low cost, and large dynamic range, this high-throughput method has the potential to change the landscape of adhesive material characterization.

High throughput adhesive protein-based biomaterials screening pipeline

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.