Wearing goggles, lab coats and closed-toe shoes, students from across UC Davis gathered around a red press as Professor Christina Cogdell went over safety protocols. After weeks of growing mycelium in their biodesign class, they were eager use the press to turn the organic material into bricks.
Yes, bricks.
A composite of mycelium, the underground web that gives rise to mushrooms, mixed with sawdust, these bricks could be a building material of the future. For Cogdell, that future may be coming this fall.
She is in the process of applying for a grant that would help fund the production of tiny home-like structures made of these mycelium bricks, which could then be used to help shelter farmworkers from the heat.
“We're actually finding out that our mushroom bricks are comparable to high-strength concrete,” said Cogdell, who teaches in the Department of Design. “They're incredibly strong. Crazy strong. They keep bending steel on our machines. It's weird. It's kind of mind-boggling.”
BioDesign is just one of the classes taught in the BioInnovation Lab at UC Davis. A maker space for undergraduate research, the BioInnovation Lab provides a place for students to learn basic lab skills, experiment, innovate and contribute to research while also providing access to technologies they might not otherwise have. Current interdisciplinary research in the BioInnovation Lab includes biodesign, biotechnology, cell biology, biochemistry and bioengineering.
“The space is incredibly valuable,” said Whitney Duim, an assistant professor of teaching in the Department of Chemistry who also uses the space. “It’s a tremendous resource.”
Teaching protein engineering through real research
This past April, a different group of UC Davis students honed their pipetting skills inside the BioInnovation Lab in preparation for a quarter-long enzyme design research project. In groups, the students transferred colored liquids into cell culture plates. Once done, they brought their plates to a spectrophotometer to check their accuracy.
This is what Ashley Vater, an instructional designer in Justin Siegel’s chemistry lab, calls “pipetting 101.”
“The goal here is to really get the students totally comfortable and confident in using their pipettes correctly,” said Vater. “If they fail at this, all of the downstream experiments that we do starting next week will not work. This is the bread and butter of the whole class.”
That class is Design2Data, which teaches students the nuts and bolts of protein engineering. Launched in 2019, Design2Data has flourished with the support of the BioInnovation Lab, founded by Professor of Biomedical Engineering Marc Facciotti.
Back when Vater first toured the space, she was impressed by how well-stocked it was with equipment. There were centrifuges, incubators, shakers and vortex mixers, water baths and ultra-low temperature freezers, to name a few instruments.
“It’s really standard equipment, but that doesn’t always exist in a teaching lab,” Vater said. “If you have the professional equipment that’s used for real research, you can get legitimate results. You can do meaningful work in the space.”
Expanding undergraduate research beyond UC Davis
Protein engineering is key to improving therapeutics, biofuels and crop yields. But proteins are complex. The human body alone produces around 20,000 different kindsof proteins, many with innumerable sequence variations. With so many nuances and variables to account for, understanding proteins and their design is a project that benefits from the work of many hands and many minds, including those of students at UC Davis.
After learning lab basics, Design2Data students model protein mutations using accessible, protein visualization tools and test if a particular mutation enhances or hinders an enzyme’s structural integrity and functionality.
Once a mutant is designed digitally and the genetic construct is built with molecular biology practices, the students use E. coli to produce the protein and purify it with standard chromatography methods. The end product is then tested to answer the questions: How efficiently does the variant protein do its jobs? And how much heat can be applied before it loses its activity?
The students then add their findings to an open-access, crowd-sourced database used internationally by professional protein design scientists.
Thus far, Design2Data students have focused their attention on B-Glucosidase B-enzyme (BglB). Affectionately called “bagel,” this enzyme has the potential to play a key role in the production of biofuels.
The Design2Data class has been so successful that its workflow has been rolled out to 40 institutions across the nation. More than 5,000 students across the country have taken the course.
“We have faculty from all over the country at different types of institutions, including community colleges and liberal arts schools,” Vater said. “We really try to connect with institutions that have limited research resources, meaning it might be especially hard for their students to get research experience.”
The resources and workflow protocols developed in the BioInnovation Lab have enabled Design2Data to flourish not just at UC Davis, but across the country. Thanks to the space, students can contribute to real research with real impacts, both for today and for tomorrow.
Preparing students for careers in science and design
When Duim joined the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis in 2020 as a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry, she knew she wanted to design a class focused on protein aggregation. She just needed a space to host it.
She heard about the BioInnovation Lab from Vater and Siegel, and reached out to Facciotti and Andrew Yao, the manager of the lab, to discuss the feasibility of hosting a class in the facility.
“They have been tremendously supportive and welcoming to me in the space, and they have really made the class possible,” Duim said.
Duim’s class “Nanoscale characterization of protein aggregation involved in human disease” may sound advanced but it’s specifically designed for any undergraduate in their first-year at UC Davis, including transfer students.
“Protein aggregation is when proteins in our bodies misfold so they don’t take the shape they’re supposed to, and then they stick to one another,” Duim said. “It’s associated with a number of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, and it’s also been implicated in type 2 diabetes.”
Like the students in Design2Data, students in Duim’s class are introduced to the basics of research. They learn how to read research papers, the importance of reproducibility in science and basic wet lab techniques. What’s more, students can explore specific areas of the research enterprise that spur their interest.
“I definitely have students who just love the wet lab work. They love manipulating solutions and proteins and making samples,” Duim said. “Then I have students who really love the microscopy part. They’re interested in the optics and they’re interested in lasers and how that all works. And then I have some students who like data analysis and the image processing.
Students finish the class with high-resolution fluorescence images of protein aggregates displaying nanometer-scale features. A paper describing the class’s content and effect on students has just been accepted by the Journal of Chemical Education. Emily Liu, one of the first students to take the class, is Duim’s coauthor.
Making a better brick
Following the safety training in Cogdell’s class, students split into several groups, some making bricks or growing more mycelium while others worked on methods to improve the brick’s attributes.
One way to do this is to make coatings for the bricks, not unlike treating patio furniture to withstand outdoor elements. Such chemical coatings, however, often containper- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly referred to as “PFAS” or “forever chemicals,” that may be harmful to ecosystems and public health. In Cogdell’s class, however, ecology and sustainability are woven into all aspects of design, preparing students to work with new technologies and address environmental concerns.
In the lab, design students Lou Stein, Bella Buckner and Kara Thomas mixed chemicals using a magnetic stirrer, trying to make a water-resistant film coating.
“We're just experimenting with corn zein, ethanol glycol and glycerol,” Stein said. “This is only one of the naturally derived films that we're trying to make. Hopefully it produces something that will be interesting and at least a little bit hydrophobic.”
Using leftover rice hulls, or husks, collected locally and water ferns fished out of Putah Creek, other students worked on making fire-resistant additions. Yet another group was working on increasing the brick’s thermal insulation properties.
Students in Cogdell’s class come from design, engineering, biological sciences and other disciplines. While some students have lab experience, those coming from the Department of Design or other arts and humanities departments often don’t have any.
“In the beginning we were a little nervous that we didn’t really have experience in the lab,” Buckner said, “but somebody said that designers think more rationally — I don't know if it's true or not, but you have to make something that can be put into use with the whole world in mind.”
“Yes, we're both kind of slightly unfamiliar with the lab environment but it's very exciting to feel like you're part of an interdisciplinary field,” Stein added.
The multiplicity of mushrooms
Cogdell has been teaching BioDesign in collaboration with the Bioinnovation Lab for nearly a decade. In the past, teams have created press-on nails made from fish scales, bioplastic made from leftover agricultural waste and algae, as well as biodegradable diapers and bandages. She introduced mycelium to the class two years ago resulting in an air filter and plans for an ecovillage — plans that led to all this brick production.
But the students made more than bricks.
“We're working with waste from mushrooms to create new materials for design — you can make leather, you can make foams, you can make hard bricks,” Cogdell said. “Mushroom farmers can grow mushrooms on agricultural waste so, if you increase the market for mycelium-based materials, basically you can use more ag-waste to create both food and materials, and the goal of these materials is to make design more sustainable.”
Phoebe Johnson had never been in a lab before taking the class and, by the spring quarter, she was growing her own mycelium leather.
Now an alum of the Department of Design, Johnson has always been interested in sustainable textiles and the prospect of reducing the amount of textile waste that goes into landfills and canals of foreign cities each year.
To grow mycelium leather, “we start with the substrate, which is basically the food for the mycelium. We use alfalfa and oak pellets, crumble that up, put in a little bit of water, inoculate it with mycelium and then you basically put it somewhere in a dry, cool, dark place,” Johnson explained. “Mind you, mycelium normally grows under the ground, so we’re basically trying to mimic that.”
To make this slow growing mycelium into something like leather, Johnson broke it into small pieces under a sterile hood, then laid it out on a baking sheet with flour as food. As the mycelium continues to grow and eat, it will merge back together as a solid, compressed sheet.
Using a similar process, Johnson’s team also worked on making biodegradable signage in the hopes it can be used in next year’s mycelium exhibit at the Design Museum on campus, replacing typical materials like vinyl, plexiglass and plywood.
“One of the main sustainability ideas that we have with mycelium and anything that we make out of the myco-materials is that, yes, we can create ones that do last a long time but, also, not everything needs to last a long time,” Johnson said. “If we have a museum exhibition that we’re only ever going to show once, why do we need to make plastic signage that will last 500 years?”
Expanding the future of the BioInnovation Lab
On Friday, May 29, the last bricks of the spring quarter were passed around the room — the students were giving their final presentations to each other, Cogdell and several leaders in the emerging bio-design industry.
“It’s wet,” someone exclaimed. “Oh, it smells nice,” noted a few others as they tried to describe the petrichor-like scent of the slightly soft, moist but incredibly sturdy mycelium brick. Each with its own coating, each a little different in texture and fragrance.
Cogdell said none of this work would be possible without the BioInnovation Lab.
“It’s the only reason I can teach biodesign,” she said. “It's pioneering experiential hands-on education.”
Since its inception, the BioInnovation Lab has served roughly 1,400 UC Davis students per year. Facciotti and his colleagues are now working on expanding existing programs and launching new initiatives in the space through UC Davis’ Sustaining Teaching and Research Task Force.
“We’ve loved working with faculty and students from the College of Letters and Science and are eager to keep exploring opportunities for new partnerships with its faculty, staff and students,” Facciotti said. “We want to explore all sorts of new ideas."
“We want to take a broad view of how biology touches our lives and innovate new curriculum and opportunities for our students to get ‘hands-on’ learning,” he added. “I’d love to encourage folks who have some interest to reach out.”
To learn more about the BioInnovation Lab, you can visit the facility’s website or reach out to Marc Facciotti at [email protected]
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