Mapping the Materials Genome

(Inside Science) -- Today at the APS Meeting, Krishna Rajan of Iowa State University discussed the work at his "collaboratory" on developing a "materials genome," an effort to capture important information on materials, their structures, and properties and connect them together in a sort of interrelated web of information. It's an effort that will support the White House's Materials Genome Initiative, which aims to accelerate breakthroughs in advanced materials by organizing the information in a way that helps researchers see connections between materials and their properties.

Currently, Rajan said, scientists access information on materials and chemicals through a "database" approach -- they look up the properties of  a material in a database, and it's isolated from all the other materials out there. But the materials genome would be a "knowledge discovery" based on informatics. If a scientist or engineer needed a material with a certain property, they could see the material they had in mind, along with several other materials with the same or similar properties. This way, researchers could see connections between materials or structural properties and discover new things. The same would apply if they wanted to build a material that combined several desired properties, in what is known as combinatorial chemistry.

Rajan showed barcodes that encapsulated a material's properties and structures, as a way of condensing information on a material. The audience appeared intrigued, and receptive, to the idea.

This poster, created by Rajan and his colleagues, is too small to read, and not specifically related to the Materials Genome Initiative (it was created several years before it was announced), but it demonstrates the idea of using informatics to organize information about materials. It visually shows information about chemical catalysts in a comprehensive informational graphic.

Information science is transforming basic science, in ways that are unfolding before our eyes.