Bionics of active filamentous structures – DynaSnap

The climbing plants like vine (but also cucumber, squash, watermelon, peas...) have rod-like supple organs called tendrils which, adopting helical conformation, allow the plant to fix to support. Our preliminary results within IDEX Emergence UPC « Dynavine » show that singular snapping-like events can take place in both bioinspired synthetic helices (Dilly et al., PRL 2023) and living tendrils. This is the proof of the concept of our main objective: going from bioinspired to bionic snapping devices (human-conditioned living systems for targeted performance). We will start from fundamental understanding of instabilities in elastic rods to be able to understand conditions for living plant tendrils to reach the critical snapping-prone conformations. This will allow to create tendril motor: a bionic device without any frictional articulation (no piston nor rotational parts) in which the tendril differential growth is used to generate rapid mechanical action by snapping.
Our proof of concept, small size and targeted competences of consortium guarantee the dynamism and success of proposed actions. The proposers D. Zanchi from MSC laboratory of the University of Paris with competences in mechanics and biophysics and Julien Derr from RDP laboratory at ENS Lyon with competences in plant morphogenesis, time-lapse monitoring, 3D reconstruction and mechano-biophysics will carry out the experimental, time-lapse and data-analysis part of research, both in the laboratory and on the field. The partner S. Neukirch from Institut d’Alembert of the Sorbonne University will assume the theoretical part of the study, for his competences in theory and simulation of elastic structures.