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Dr. “Imagine creating buildings that heal themselves,” Datta said.
Dr. The best analogy, according to Joshi, would be a seed turning into a tree. A seed has all the information it needs to collect the sun’s energy and organize its growth and development into something as complex and large as a tree. In an engineered life system, a single engineered cell can function like a seed.
Microbes, on their own, are not very good at forming clearly defined shapes in three dimensions. “Think of pond scum,” said Dr. josh. “It’s the kind of level of complexity that bacteria are comfortable with in terms of forming shapes.”
Typically, microbial inks rely on a polymer scaffold to harden their nasty form. But polymers have their own limitations and can alter the mechanical properties of the ink in undesirable ways, said Dr. dat. Also, polymers must be biocompatible so that microbes do not die. Synthetic polymers such as polyethylene are derived from oil and are not renewable.
Ditching polymers and using only microbes “gives a lot more tunability in what you can print,” said R. Kōnane Bay, a soft matter physicist and new assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the research.
Many engineered living materials take the form of hydrogels, structures such as gelatin that can absorb large amounts of water. In 2018, Virginia Tech engineer and author of the new paper, Dr. Joshi and Anna Duraj-Thatte successfully created an article. hydrogel from fully grown and regenerative E. coli.
Although the hydrogel could be run through a syringe, it was not rigid enough to stand on its own. Dr. “You can’t make any structures,” Duraj-Thatte said.
The researchers needed to solidify the substance. “We found this strategy where we use fibrin, a polymer used in blood clotting in humans and many other animals,” said team member Avinash Manjula-Basavanna, who completed the study while a researcher at Harvard University.
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