Center for Biomedical Engineering

We are using biomimetic principles to develop heat/infrared sensors based on the thermal imaging capabilities of venomous snakes, such as rattlesnakes and copperheads. These animals have a heat-sensitive pit organ that can guide the their predatory attack even in the complete absence of light. Recordings from ours and other labs indicate this organ is highly sensitive and highly adaptive. It can sense differences as small as 0.003°C, yet works extremely well at a range of ambient temperatures. Man-made devices require expensive cooling to reach this sensitivity. We hypothesize that this thermal sensitivity is a property of ion channel proteins in the terminal nerve bundle of the pit organ, but the transducer proteins that sense and convey information about temperature change are completely unknown. We have begun to characterize ion channels that are sensitive to temperature changes in cells that innervate the pit organ in hope that we can isolate these proteins and adapt them to synthetic heat detectors. We are also using the characteristics of snake neurons to engineer a cloned mammalian heat sensitive protein (vanilloid receptor, VR1) to mimic the heat sensing characteristics found in snake neurons. Using iterative mutation and selection for desired thermosensory characteristics, a technique called directed evolution, we will attempt to develop a library of VR1 mutants having lower and higher temperature thresholds.