AVS 72 Session BI-MoA: The Future of Biointerface Science

Food security and agricultural economies depend on the continued production of grain crops, including barley, wheat and oats. Foliar fungal diseases pose a major threat to grains production worldwide, and solutions to reduce their incidence heavily rely on broadacre fungicide applications after disease occurs. This can be costly, environmentally harmful and eventually promote the emergence of chemically resistant pathogens. Prophylactic strategies to prevent fungal disease occurrence are scarce, but a shared bottleneck to fungal disease progression may a key target for intervention: the fungal pathogen must detect and successfully recognise the host’s surface. This initial point of contact in plant-fungi interactions can hence be reframed as a biointerfaces problem that materials science can address.

The cuticle is a waxy bio-composite that coats the surface of leaves and is comprised of a cutin matrix that is embedded and/or coated with cuticular waxes, long chain aliphatic compounds that display an extensive range of carbon chain lengths and functional groups. Physiologically, the cuticle plays vital roles in water retention and physical defence against disease, however; increasing evidence has demonstrated that some cuticular waxes can signal recognition to pathogenic fungi to promote infection. The complexity of these plant-fungi interactions hence make them challenging to study and require model systems that can assess the effect of individual surface variables on fungal development.

To address this, we propose the development of a biomimetic model system using fabricated wax films to replicate native leaf chemistries on inert substrates. Using fabrication techniques including spin-coating to generate thin films that can be characterised using a suite of analytical techniques to assess their hydrophobicity, thickness, uniformity and morphology, precise tuning of surface physicochemical properties can be achieved. Individual surface parameters can then be disentangled and systematically assessed in the context of fungal development to identify key virulence traits at the leaf surface.

Biomaterials are increasingly being explored as sustainable alternatives to petroleum-derived materials, but many systems that perform well at laboratory scale remain difficult to manufacture reliably at industrial scale. One reason for this disconnect is that biomaterial structure and function are strongly influenced by the physical conditions present during assembly, including flow, transport, dewatering, and drying conditions that differ substantially between laboratory and industrial environments. This talk presents a framework for designing biomaterials with formation conditions and manufacturing environments considered from the outset instead of introducing process constraints only after laboratory optimization. Using papermaking and related large-scale bio-based manufacturing systems as examples, the presentation examines how process-dependent assembly governs interfacial structure development across systems including microfibrillated cellulose, protein-based materials, biofilms, and mycelium composites. Differences between benchtop and industrial processing are discussed in terms of flow behavior, transport limitations, shear history, and consolidation dynamics, demonstrating that scale-dependent physical regimes can produce fundamentally different structures and functional behavior. The talk further outlines a process-integrated framework in which material selection, structure formation, and manufacturing constraints are treated as interconnected design variables. Finally, future needs in process-relevant characterization, multiscale modeling, and experimental tools capable of probing biomaterial formation under realistic manufacturing conditions are discussed. Incorporating formation pathways into biomaterials research may improve reproducibility and help bridge the gap between laboratory discovery and industrial implementation.