Universal Fabricators

There is no minimum time commitment required for the Principal Investigator (when different to the Technical Project Lead). In the ideal case, the Technical Project Lead, which could be a postdoc, employee, a PI, an exceptional student, CO-I or a co-lead, should be >80% time committed to the project, and should be individually named in proposals. This so that we can feel confident that there is strong technical ownership and clear responsibility as the primary point of contact for the active management of the project with ARIA. We are keen to explore structures not typical in academic research, such as supporting early career researchers as project leads or funding large (>80%) proportions of senior academics’ time so that they can focus fully on their ARIA project.

If a new recruit is needed and a Technical Project Lead cannot be named in advance, we expect teams to propose a “ramp-up” period, during which named alternate project team member(s), who may or may not be the PI, will temporarily serve as the Technical Project Lead (>80% time) until an ideal full-time project lead is hired.

We are agnostic to the length of the polypeptide chain, and define what is considered in scope as a protein as long as they can be programmed to precisely assemble into structures with repeatable 3D geometries/interfaces to template the assembly of defect-free inorganic materials. Engineered polypeptides that are “mini-proteins” or designed as ensembles, are in scope if they can achieve this. Short peptides that are used primarily as a motif, additive, or sub-module (binding, nucleation, linking) are out of scope as the main programmable substrate, if they cannot achieve multivalent, hierarchical, defect-suppressed macroscopic assembly (PO1: programmable assembly instruction set). Likewise when solid-phase synthesis methods are proposed, please consider that there must be a credible path to scalable manufacturing (PO3). Proposals where peptides are used as a supportive component, subordinate to a protein-programmed assembly platform, are in scope.

The final materials produced must either be fully inorganic (proteins removed entirely) or be composites with an inorganic component, as this is Programme Objective 2.

Approaches that use enzymes (or other catalysts) are in scope if used as a complimentary mechanism to meet all 3 of our Programme Objectives (1. Hierarchical assembly, 2. Inorganics with state-of-art interfacial precision & programmable tunability, and 3. Process scalability).
In the context of the 1D Challenge: The final hollow fibre material is made of silica and should not contain any protein. Fibre geometry (inner and outer diameters) should be controllable by programming proteins and external reactor design. All manufacturing approaches are in scope that use proteins to template the assembly of the silica fibre, regardless if a protein fibre is formed or not. Approaches that use enzymes in a bespoke process that lack the required programmability, precision, or generalisability ("universality"), are not in scope.

We acknowledge that the TA1.1 Month 36 “<0.1nm internal surface roughness” target is deliberately ambitious and, as written, an under-specified imperfect proxy single scalar number. We recognise that for optical fibres, the impact of interface disorder on loss depends on the operating wavelength and what length scales the unwanted surface error lives on (spatial frequency). Given the programme’s initial emphasis on structural programmability over specific material function, we won’t make funding decisions based on different interpretations of this proxy metric, but we will make a decision if no thought at all has been given to this metric. For your proposal, we ask that describe at the level of: what design you plan subtract off, what size patch you measure, what range of feature sizes you include, and what numerical measure of the remaining error you report. We will use that as a starting point for milestone definition and refine it with funded teams and industry advisors during contracting and in the first year of the programme.

We apologise, there is an “e.g.,” missing in bullet 2 of TA1.1 36 Month targets in front of cavity ring-down. Please treat cavity ring-down as an illustrative method, not a mandated one. Likewise, AFM on cleaved sections is an example, not the only acceptable roughness assay. Please note that we are looking for first-tier metrology to be in-house, rapid, and iterative with standard equipment/proxy measurements. We intend to contract second-tier external high-resolution benchmarking separately and contracted across all programme teams through a subsequent call. We encourage you to propose the most cost + time efficient in-house/in-line attenuation measurements for daily testing, and if known, propose external sub-contracted partners with existing metrology rigs to do independent cross-checking that ARIA can look to invite to the subsequent call.