BioPhot
Coordinator
Prof. Jean Pol Vigneron, Laboratoire de Physique du Solide, Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix
Partners
- United Kingdom: Natural History Museum, London
- Hungary: Research Institute for Technical Physics Materials, Budapest
- Hungary: Hungarian Natural History Museum
- France: Université Pierre et Marie Curie
Description
The kaleidoscope of colours, shapes and sizes that is found in the natural world is clear evidence of the complexity of living organisms. This complexity has been driven by evolution over millions of years and many creatures show extraordinary adaptations that have given their species a competitive edge in the game of life.
The BIOPHOT project studies this natural complexity in the specific case of how creatures interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly visible light but also the neighboring infra-red and ultraviolet regions, to enhance their survival and reproduction chances. A vast range of optimised natural optical devices and materials have evolved that are used by various organisms in a wide variety of complex tasks ranging from sexual signalling to thermal management.
Using a broad perspective and a number of complementary disciplines results in creation of combination of techniques that give a deep and detailed insight both of the evolutionary processes that have optimised a certain structure by a particular task and also the manner in which different but related structures exhibit altered properties. The physical characterization focuses around a combination of optical and electron microcopy techniques that can give new knowledge of the micro- and nanomorphology of specific bioorganisms which display unique and remarkable lightscattering ability. This structural information is related to precise measurements of the light filtering function using micrometer-resolved spectrophotometric and thermal measurement. Extensive measurements of the reflection, absorption and polarization changes as a function of the frequency and angle of incidence of electromagnetic radiation are made.
Extensive numerical simulation is also employed using the parallel computing system at the University of Namur. As a bonus, this provides an opportunity to test the 'grid-computing model that is an essential issue for a number of European initiatives.
The target organisms are also studied in terms of their ecological and phonological (the timing of various biological phases) history and closelyrelated or competing species will be identified for future examination.