Researchers at a new NASA's sponsored institute at UCLA hope to create the next generation of technologies for exploring space by mimicking the remarkable self-organizing capabilities of the biological system.

The Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration, which will receive up to $40 million over 10 years, is one of five institutes that NASA established this month to explore promising 21st-century technologies.

The new institute brings together scientists from UCLA's engineering and medical schools, as well as from the physical and life sciences.

They will be joined by leading researchers from Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Arizona State University.

The California NanoSystems Institute, a joint enterprise of UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, will provide infrastructure to help support the research.

Researchers believe the answers to developing new technologies for the nation's space program can be found in nature.

"Biological systems have acquired through eons of evolution an amazing ability to manage information on multiple levels — organizing themselves into increasingly complex structures, from tissue to organ to complex human biological systems," said Chih-Ming Ho, Ben Rich Lockheed Martin Professor and director of the new institute.

How behavior at one level influences the next, and what information is passed on from level to level, are issues that researchers want to examine.

"Our strategy is to mimic the cell's information -processing abilities to establish a model for space system design that will redefine space exploration technology," Ho said.

All the researchers at the Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration are world-class leaders in their own fields and have track records for turning concepts into realities, Ho said.

The institute will enable scientists from different fields to work together in an integrated environment, said Deputy Director Carlo Montemagno, Roy and Carol Doumani Professor.

Looking to nature for inspiration makes good sense, he explained.

"That's how the world really is, after all," Montemagno said. "Biological systems make no distinctions between chemistry, biology or physics."