Cyanobacteria newly isolated from marine volcanic seeps display rapid sinking and robust, high-density growth.

Unlabelled: Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic organisms that play important roles in carbon cycling and are promising bioproduction chassis. Here, we isolate two novel cyanobacteria with 4.6Mbp genomes, UTEX 3221 and UTEX 3222, from a unique marine environment with naturally elevated CO₂.

Light and carbon: Synthetic biology toward new cyanobacteria-based living biomaterials.

Cyanobacteria are ideal candidates to use in developing carbon neutral and carbon negative technologies; they are efficient photosynthesizers and amenable to genetic manipulation. Over the past two decades, researchers have demonstrated that cyanobacteria can make sustainable, useful biomaterials, many of which are engineered living materials. However, we are only beginning to see such technologies applied at an industrial scale.

Unlocking the magic in mycelium: Using synthetic biology to optimize filamentous fungi for biomanufacturing and sustainability.

Filamentous fungi drive carbon and nutrient cycling across our global ecosystems, through its interactions with growing and decaying flora and their constituent microbiomes. The remarkable metabolic diversity, secretion ability, and fiber-like mycelial structure that have evolved in filamentous fungi have been increasingly exploited in commercial operations. The industrial potential of mycelial fermentation ranges from the discovery and bioproduction of enzymes and bioactive compounds, the decarbonization of food and material production, to environmental remediation and enhanced agricultural production.

Engineered Living Materials For Sustainability.

Recent advances in synthetic biology and materials science have given rise to a new form of materials, namely engineered living materials (ELMs), which are composed of living matter or cell communities embedded in self-regenerating matrices of their own or artificial scaffolds. Like natural materials such as bone, wood, and skin, ELMs, which possess the functional capabilities of living organisms, can grow, self-organize, and self-repair when needed. They also spontaneously perform programmed biological functions upon sensing external cues.

Ultra-lightweight living structural material for enhanced stiffness and environmental sensing.

Natural materials such as bone, wood, and bamboo can inspire the fabrication of stiff, lightweight structural materials. Biofilms are one of the most dominant forms of life in nature. However, little is known about their physical properties as a structural material.

Hydrogel-based biocontainment of bacteria for continuous sensing and computation.

Genetically modified microorganisms (GMMs) can enable a wide range of important applications including environmental sensing and responsive engineered living materials. However, containment of GMMs to prevent environmental escape and satisfy regulatory requirements is a bottleneck for real-world use. While current biochemical strategies restrict unwanted growth of GMMs in the environment, there is a need for deployable physical containment technologies to achieve redundant, multi-layered and robust containment.

Living materials with programmable functionalities grown from engineered microbial co-cultures.

Biological systems assemble living materials that are autonomously patterned, can self-repair and can sense and respond to their environment. The field of engineered living materials aims to create novel materials with properties similar to those of natural biomaterials using genetically engineered organisms. Here, we describe an approach to fabricating functional bacterial cellulose-based living materials using a stable co-culture of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast and bacterial cellulose-producing Komagataeibacter rhaeticus bacteria.

3D Printing of Living Responsive Materials and Devices.

3D printing has been intensively explored to fabricate customized structures of responsive materials including hydrogels, liquid-crystal elastomers, shape-memory polymers, and aqueous droplets. Herein, a new method and material system capable of 3D-printing hydrogel inks with programed bacterial cells as responsive components into large-scale (3 cm), high-resolution (30 μm) living materials, where the cells can communicate and process signals in a programmable manner, are reported. The design of 3D-printed living materials is guided by quantitative models that account for the responses of programed cells in printed microstructures of hydrogels.

The Mendeleev-Meyer force project.

Here we present the Mendeleev-Meyer Force Project which aims at tabulating all materials and substances in a fashion similar to the periodic table. The goal is to group and tabulate substances using nanoscale force footprints rather than atomic number or electronic configuration as in the periodic table. The process is divided into: (1) acquiring nanoscale force data from materials, (2) parameterizing the raw data into standardized input features to generate a library, (3) feeding the standardized library into an algorithm to generate, enhance or exploit a model to identify a material or property.

Nanoscale hydrophilicity studies of Gulf parrotfish (Scarus persicus) scales.

The Gulf parrotfish (Scarus persicus) offers inspiration for a strategy to combat marine biofouling, a problem of great economic and environmental interest to the maritime community, through its use of a continually maintained, multifunctional, water-based mucus layer to cover its scales. In this study, to better understand the scale-mucus interface, we investigate the nanoscale hydrophilicity of the fish scales by comparing reconstructed force distance profiles obtained using an amplitude-modulation atomic force microscopy (AM-AFM) technique. We note significant differences between three morphologically distinct regions of each scale, as well as between scales from four spatially distinct regions of the fish.

The aging of a surface and the evolution of conservative and dissipative nanoscale interactions.

A method to monitor variations in the conservative and dissipative forces in dynamic atomic force microscopy is proposed in order to investigate the effects of exposing a surface to different sets of environmental conditions for prolonged periods of time. The variations are quantified by proposing and defining two metrics, one for conservative and another for dissipative interactions. Mica and graphite are chosen as model samples because they are atomically flat and easy to cleave.