Dr. Hanieh Mianehrow
Main Focus
The fascinating colors in nature, both in animal kingdom and in plants, has been a source of inspiration for researchers to make materials with similar brilliant colors. Fruits with blue metallic structural coloration, such as Margaritaria nobilis, are an interesting example (see Fig.1). Such colors are not produced by the conventional pigmentation, but by the structuring of transparent materials at a length-scale that can interact with visible light.
To design materials with a similar visual appearance, it is essential to have a fundamental understanding of the chemical composition of the main components and the molecular interactions between them. In the plant cell wall, cellulose is usually present in the form of hierarchical microfibrils covered by hemicelluloses. Cellulose and hemicelluloses have a naturally high affinity towards each other, and the chemical composition of the hemicelluloses has an effect on molecular adhesion between the two. To understand the effect of hemicelluloses on the arrangement of cellulose fibres in the plant cell wall, it is essential to look at the molecular interactions between the two. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is a powerful tool which gives us detailed information on cellulose-hemicellulose interactions at the atomistic scale. Such fundamental study not only helps to understand the origin of structural colors in similar fruit species, but also it opens many doors to the molecular arrangement of cellulose and hemicelluloses in the plant cell wall.
I am particularly interested in:
- The effect of xylan substitution, as the most common hemicellulose, on the extent of interaction with cellulose crystal
- The adhesion between xylan and cellulose crystal
- The conformational analysis of xylan in the presence of cellulose crystal surface, both the hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces
Publications
https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=JZnaeB0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Hanieh Mianehrow is a postdoctoral scientist and Maria Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sustainable and Bio-Inspired Materials, headed by Prof. Silvia Vignolini, at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces.
Dr. Mianehrow received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in polymer engineering in Tehran, Iran. She subsequently moved to Sweden and completed her PhD in fiber and polymer science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Her PhD thesis focused on the nanostructure-properties relationship in bio-nanocomposites of cellulose and graphene oxide. In addition to employing advanced characterization techniques, Dr. Mianehrow utilized molecular dynamics (MD) simulation to study the interfacial interactions between cellulose nanofibrils and graphene oxide. At the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, she is continuing the simulation work and trying to understand hemicellulose-cellulose interactions. The main objective of her research is to understand how different substitutions on xylan, as one of the most common hemicelluloses, affect the interactions between xylan and cellulose crystal. Such a fundamental study would shed light on the self-assembly of cellulose fibers in the plant cell wall and the origin of structural colors in fruit species with structural colour, such as Margaritaria nobolis.