Translating Nature-based innovations into valuable technologies for Healthcare & Regenerative Medicine
ZooTechWorksTM (NatureWorksTM- The Next Regeneration)
Natural history data collection
Improving the knowledge of adaptations and
trade-offs necessary to complete the understanding of functions and nature-based inventions
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Excellent pioneering work was done by D'arcy Wentworth Thompson, exemplifying the local fields of physical and chemical enforcement on the shape, form, and even morphology of organisms from embryo to adulthood. This often neglected the innate genetic programming and self-organization of biological molecules and cells, which simultaneously crafted and molded the shape, form, and function of all living organisms. Indeed, a continued study of organisms in nature is needed to uncover new adaptations and the functional purpose of those adaptations. Also, to already characterized adaptations.
This continuation is supported and guided by expanded natural history observations in more significant and more focused detail than before, with a closer eye on functionality, carried out at the museum [collaborations with the Natural History Museum, London] and particularly in the field.
Harnessing natural history collections and observations gathered from field expeditions to discover new functions, materials, and structures that readily translates into technology. To do this, we are generating functional taxonomies and building functional ontologies to highlight the inter-relationships between the individual functions that extend across the natural world. Over millions of years, millions of features have been born, and refined, optimized, maximized millions of more times.
Natural history knowledge gathering exercises
Further volumes of natural history observations and field measurements are needed to expand the database of adaptations, functions and trade-offs in the natural world. Adaptations, functions and trade-offs are the pieces in the problem-solving jigsaw. We have to match the analogous problem solved in nature with the technical problem in need of resolution.
Recent expeditions to Goa, 2019, Sri Lanka, 2019 (coastal plains) & Bombay coastal regions.
These expeditions are a start in a search for, and collection of "ground-truth" data and nature-based facts and evidence, which stand for high degrees of functional problem-solving. The result is the accumulation of precise, concrete results and broad utility, leading to notable improvements in technology. Such nature guided problem-solving establishes new translational and highly workable technologies for industry (Industry biomimetics).
Systematic fieldwork studies are pivotal to the discovery of new inventions and functions that have been overlooked or not properly or consistently studied and evaluated with a view on technology translation.
Functional natural history and functional ecology are two important areas of study. It is compiling and systematizing facts and evidence from the natural history collections and fieldwork studies into a highly accessible problem-solving database. However, this requires intensive, well-planned work in the field in all possible geographies and terrains. This could take years to accomplish at a huge expense. Due to resource limitations, it is more economical to select parts of nature that will generate the largest and most diverse numbers of potential translatable inventions. The new observations by themselves are useful, but the job of characterizing adaptations and functions is enhanced by integrating the observations into ontologies and using specific techniques for identifying technologically feasible analogs from nature.
Regions, where speciation has been pronounced and strong, are good places to start discovering a range of new functions. In a large proportion of cases, the adaptive functions are incremental developments and improvements driven by chance. The sections or biomes for targeting related to the production of large diversity and abundance of adaptations are:
The key biodiversity hotspots (this covers multiple inventions concentrated in many different, finely graduated or multitudinal spectrum of habitats)
Extreme environments where extraordinary adaptations take place from the norm (where fieldwork is a difficult undertaking)
Wild, highly variable climatic zones (in very variable environments survival and persistence requires there to be a high degree of plasticity in the adaptation process)
Island, isolated and segregated biogeographical regions and biomes (distinct geographic places where high rates of speciation have occurred)
One consequential group of targets are regions with high biodiversity including subtropical and tropical islands and the biodiversity hotspots of the Himalayas, western Ghats & Sri Lanka, southern China, Malay peninsula, northwestern Andes, Amazon basin,
These hotspot regions reflect and represent natural places and habitats exhibiting exceptional speciation and differentiation between organisms in complex habitats and very varied environments and conditions into which innumerable numbers of corresponding functions adapt to and interact.
In the future, there are emerging possibilities for connecting and linking the gene sets, now being compiled, in great detail, throughout organism collections, with the functions of organisms stored in those same natural history museum collections. Currently underway are a series of major projects to list and describe the genes and proteins of potentially every organism kept in large-scale museum collections. Many of the genes can be correlated or linked with the functional phenotype. However, it takes great care to pinpoint the loci associated with a phenotype, and one must also consider the interplay of many sets or groups of genes working in concert to generate a phenotype. Hence, we look at describing and characterizing systems-level components and unified structures, materials, and devices in formulating functions. Natural history has been the study of biology, at large, at the organism and population levels. Individual organisms described at the macro-scale and micro-scale for similarities and differences.
We shall be extending this standard observation with descriptions of materials and structures at micro and nanoscales, as well to reveal more secrets behind those identified functions of interesting phenotypes. Currently, functions associated with water and light are of great interest in many fields of technology. That is those phenotypes expressing adaptations that may be of use to technology. The methods, tools, and techniques designed to select out those adaptations that can realistically and feasibly translate into useful technology.