Growing Macroscale, Modular Materials from Bacteria

Bioscientists at Rice University have introduced centimeter-scale, slime-like colonies of engineered bacteria that self-assemble from the bottom up. It can be programmed to soak up contaminants from the environment, among many possible applications.

“We’re making material from bacteria that acts like putty,” said Rice bioscientist  , Caroline Ajo-Franklin. “One of the beautiful things about it is how easy it is to make, merely needing a little motion, a few nutrients and bacteria.”

Transcript

00:00:00 these are engineered bacterial cells so little microbes that we we design so that they stick together we find in nature there's all kinds of amazing natural materials things like bone things like our fingernails our teeth things like wood and shells these materials have amazing properties but the problem is they're hard to make if

00:00:24 i want wood i've got to grow a tree for like 20 years and so what we're really seeking to do over the long term is figure out how we can engineer the smallest cells microorganisms to be able to make these materials in a laboratory rather than outside in nature engineer living materials provide a new kind of matter that is not you know when you assemble a non-living material

00:00:53 that's pretty much it it doesn't evolve or adapt to the environment like his characteristics are pretty fixed while living material has cells inside it so they can actively communicate with environment they can actively process input and respond with output and so the potential of this material would be especially at the interface with living systems because you can

00:01:16 engineer an active conversation between living system and and materials that contain cells we can kind of compare just by looking at it just what normal cells look like what our engineered cells look like and what our engineered cells look like when they're when we dry them out and so there's a nice little gradient of liquid to solid that we got going on

00:01:36 here nature's had four billion years to figure this out so we are trying to learn from nature how it did it before and even learn from physics how we're able to assemble small particles into a larger material use those lessons to basically re to engineer microorganisms that usually don't make materials

00:02:00 into making them [Music]