Biomedical engineers and architects are collaborating on a project to create a living building façade that adapts to its environment. By studying plants, fetal chick hearts, and adult brain cancers, they aim to develop sustainable building designs and improve climate-adaptable plants, heart defect p
Biomedical engineer Jonathan Butcher never thought he could learn how to fix cardiac malformations by analyzing brain cancer or plants.
“Our overarching goal is to see if there are common rules that apply across plants and animals, through which shape and size emerge from the interaction of the cells,” says Adrienne Roeder, the lead principal investigator of 13 researchers spanning plant biology, biomedical engineering, and architecture from Cornell, Tuskegee University and the University of Minnesota.
“The cellular building blocks are very dynamic, and they’re exhibiting important signaling information at that scale that’s not captured in any gene profiling,” he said. To test that hypothesis, their first step is to understand the mechanical properties of the cells in the biological systems they’re targeting.
Across all three organ systems, they’ll test how the cells in each system react to the mechanical aspects of their environments, using a microscope invented by Steven Adie, associate professor in the Meinig School. The technique – optical coherence elastography – provides a high-resolution 3D “palpation” by mechanically perturbing a sample and precisely imaging the corresponding displacements.
“We can track a bunch of different biological properties at the same time,” says Roeder, associate professor in Section of Plant Biology in the School of Integrative Plant Science, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and at the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology.
But glioblastoma is the opposite. It starts in a structure – the brain – that is already fully formed and homogeneous. The cancer breaks that homogeneity, generating variable cells that become more and more variable as the tumor grows unconstrained. That’s the type of responsivity to the environment that Sabin envisions from the project’s fourth phase.
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