Dissecting microbiological systems using materials science.

Materials science offers microbiologists a wide variety of organic and inorganic materials with chemical and physical properties that can be precisely controlled. These materials present new capabilities for isolating, manipulating and studying bacteria and other microorganisms and are poised to transform microbiology. This review summarizes three classes of materials that span a range of length scales (nano, micro and meso) and describes a variety of fundamental questions in microbiology that can be studied by leveraging their properties.