e-PROT
ENGINEERED CONDUCTIVE PROTEINS FOR BIOELECTRONICS
H2020-FETOPEN-2018-2020 | Grant agreement: 964593
September 2021 – September 2025
E-prot project aims to develop a green platform technology for sustainable and efficient bio-electronic systems exploiting the potential of proteins—the building blocks of natural systems. As a matter of fact, proteins offer structural stability and inherent biocompatibility while displaying modest but appealing electrical and proton conduction features. While still limited to basic research, the E-prot project strives to bring this technology to a level of sophistication enabling real-world applications.
Through protein engineering, a robust protein scaffold (modular consensus tetratricopeptide repeat, CTPR) will be optimized to improve its conductivity without mechanical integrity loss. This work will rely on a profound understanding of protein building blocks; biomolecular design principles; state-of-the-art synthetic biology, and chemical tools, to systematically fabricate these protein materials.
At the same time, cutting-edge characterization techniques and computational models will provide an unprecedented fundamental understanding of protein conduction thus building a solid foundation for their technological implementation.
Selected engineered conductive proteins will be up-scaled and implemented in two different applications, smart ink-based conductors for electronic textile application and ionic electrolytes in energy storage devices, as a first demonstration of an e-Prot based biocompatible electronic devices.
To achieve the ambitious goals of this project, e-Prot brings together a gender-balanced, interdisciplinary consortium including excellent young researchers and established reputed experts in: Protein design and Synthetic Biology of multifunctional hybrid protein-based systems (BIOMA, Spain), Synthetic and peptide chemistry (CiQUS, Spain), Computational Chemistry of conductive materials (CICECO, Portugal), Bioelectronic materials (BGU, Israel), Molecular, nano/microelectronics (UA, Spain), Material chemistry, processing, and characterization (SP, France), Device Engineering for Power Storage, Batteries and Supercapacitors (ENERGI, Spain), and Electronic textiles and wearable bioelectronics in industrial applications (SFabric, UK).
Our partners in e-Prot project
