While cellular chemical processing still eclipses present chemical engineering and technology in its versatility, robustness, efficiency and especially evolvability, it is limited in technical programmability by its dependency on extant micro-organisms, whether natural or genetically engineered, and the absence of a high-bandwidth bidirectional computer interface. Protostream aims to overcome these limitations by providing programmable complex combinatorial chemical processing in direct contact with electronic microprocessors and computers. These chemical microprocessors will allow programmable process-oriented chemistry on a competitive scale to cells.
A key feature of chemical processing in living systems is controlled micro-compartmentation where self-assembled membranes selectively delimit the scope of reactions and products. This represents a second processing level, i.e. containment processing, above that of molecular reactions. In human cells, there is a complex regulated machinery of growth, transformation, fusion and fission of membrane bounded compartments such as endosomes which controls intracellular chemical processing on the scale of 100 nm to 10 µm. Chemical microprocessors must be able to delimit, transport, fuse and divide microcompartments containing specific chemicals to approach cellular functionality. Compartments may be built quite differently from those in cells.
Protostream will apply its experience with dynamically programmable micro-compartments to implement and market such a second-level microchemistry. Electric fields can create compartment boundaries via an interplay of electrophoretic and electroosmotic effects in single phase systems, or modulate the creation or position of phase boundaries in multiphase systems. Examples of phase boundaries which can delimit chemical reactions and are amenable to electronic position control include aqueous solution - immiscible ionic liquid boundaries. Electronic concentration of charged or uncharged molecules such as amphiphilic block copolymers, can result in reversible local gelation, micellation or membrane formation creating self-assembled phase boundaries delimiting the extent of reactions. Such phase boundaries can be processed by electric fields to allow our chemical microprocessor to orchestrate and evolve multilevel self-organized and self-assembled chemical networks. In this way, the entire microchemical processing architecture becomes reconfigurable.
The chemical microprocessor family of products of Protostream will provide customers with a programming environment for integrating complex chemical systems relying on complex spatial confinement. Through its fully automated and protocolled operation, it will also provide a service to customers in terms of reproducible and communicable protocols for handling such complex chemical systems. The absence of the latter has consistently limited the rate of progress in chemical system integration until now.