Researchers from MIT have created the first man-made living materials using E.coli bacteria.
The recently created materials have properties of both non-living and living things, according to a according to a MIT press release.
Research was published in the journal Nature Materials.
The researchers coaxed the bacteria cells to make biofilms that can join nonliving materials, such as quantum dots, according to the release.
For the experiment, researchers disabled E. coli's ability to make CsgA and switched it with a genetically engineered strain that would only work when a molecule named AHL was present.
This allowed them to control the time and place where the bacteria produced a biofilm.
By reducing or adding the amount of aTc and AHL in the altered E. coli's environment, they could control not just the production of biofilm, but also the production of biofilm that's capable of grabbing hold of any gold added, according to the release.
This allowed researchers to create a framework for producing gold circuits.
"Our idea is to put the living and the nonliving worlds together to make hybrid materials that have living cells in them and are functional. It's an interesting way of thinking about materials synthesis, which is very different from what people do now, which is usually a top-down approach," said senior author Timothy Lu, according to the release.
Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and his colleagues, essentially showed that it is in fact possible to incorporate quantum dots or even gold nanoparticles to form "living materials."
Self-healing material could help conduct and absorb electricity in solar cells, according to Lu. They could also help spot tears and fix themselves without any assistance.
"It's a really simple system but what happens over time is you get curli that's increasingly labeled by gold particles. It shows that indeed you can make cells that talk to each other and they can change the composition of the material over time. Ultimately, we hope to emulate how natural systems, like bone, form. No one tells bone what to do, but it generates a material in response to environmental signals."
Lu foresees a future where scientists, and eventually companies, can create materials which can extract energy from the world around them, according to The Register.
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