New biomaterial uses bacteria and synthetic biology

In Virginia, researchers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Pennsylvania-based Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh University created a new biomaterial that incorporates living bacterial constituents that interact with their environment using engineered surface display.

Their work can serve as an enabling technology for biomaterial synthesis and assembly. By engineering living cells that can sense, respond, and draw molecules from the local environment as the building blocks for a biomaterial, they experimentally validated a strategy for material formation using surface-displayed synthetic biology. Also, by exploiting synthetic gene constructs that enable cytosolic sensing and surface-display-based material formation, they have shown how synthetic biology may leverage spatial compartmentalization for discrete functions in the same cell. They envision their living biomaterial being used in a range of applications from biomaterial formation to biomolecule sequestration.