​Abstract:
Biomaterials are commonly employed in medical and clinical applications such as drugs delivery and tissue engineering. More and more materials are developed for regenerative medicine purposes. However, understanding exactly how cells interact with biomaterials is still work in progress. Engineering the surface chemistry of material so that it can interface with cells is an extraordinarily demanding task. The surface of a cell is composed of thousands of different lipids, proteins and carbohydrates, all intricately (and dynamically) arranged in three dimensions on multiple length scales. This complexity presents both a challenge and an opportunity to chemists working on bioactive interfaces. Understanding and engineering the biomaterial interface using innovative designs and state of the art materials characterization methods are emerging fields in bioengineering research. Polymer microarray provides the opportunity to identify novel materials that are tailored to complex biological environments by using combinatorial mixing of monomers to form large libraries of polymers as microarrays. The polymer microarray allows using high throughput surface characterization techniques to elucidate biological-material interactions with the aid of state-of-the-art characterization techniques such as water contact angle measurement, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry. Biomaterials are also useful in energy applications such as to design semi-artificial photosynthesis by mimicking natural photosynthetic machineries. It is worth to note that one-hour sunlight can satisfy the one-year energy demand of the entire world. Semi-artificial photosynthesis provides a hybrid approach to solar-to-chemical conversion by integrating the biocatalytic machinery (enzymes and microbes) with synthetic materials (dyes, electrocatalysts, semiconductors, electrodes). In such hybrid systems, enzymes and microbes function as catalysts to drive chemical reactions with thermodynamic uphills and/or chemical complexity, whereas synthetic materials act as scaffolds to immobilize biocatalysts and/or functional components that carry out light absorption, charge transfer, chemical transformations and product separation.

Bio:
Dr Shafeer Kalathil is a Marie Curie Individual Fellow at Department of Chemistry, the University of Cambridge, England (homepage). He is also acting as a College Associate of Christ’s College, the University of Cambridge. His current research is mainly on developing “Microbial Living Leaf” to produce value-added products from carbon dioxide (semi-artificial photosynthesis) and advanced electrode materials for microbial respiration. Dr Shafeer received his MSc. in Chemistry from Cochin University of Science and Technology, India in 2009 and his PhD in Chemical Engineering (research on microbial fuel cells) from Yeungnam University, S. Korea in 2013. Prior to Cambridge, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at KAUST and University of Tokyo (JSPS Fellow) where he performed research on electric bacteria. He has published 28 international peer-reviewed papers (total citations: 1403, h-index: 17), two book chapters and holds ten patents to his credit (google scholar). He is a Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry (MRSC), Solar Fuel Network (SFN), the UK and Society for Applied Microbiology, the UK. Presently, he is serving as a Reviewer Panel Member of Journals RSC Advances and Frontiers in Microbiology.