Nanowerk September 27, 2023
A major challenge in creating living materials for functional material design, integrating synthetic biology tools to endow materials with programmable, dynamic, and life-like characteristics, is balancing the tradeoff between structural stability, mechanical performance, and functional programmability. To address this problem researchers in China proposed a sheath–core living hydrogel fiber platform that synergistically integrated living bacteria with hydrogel fibers to achieve both functional diversity and structural and mechanical robustness. The microfluidic spinning was used to produce hydrogel fiber, which offered advantages in both structural and functional designability due to their hierarchical porous architectures that could be tailored and their mechanical performance that could be enhanced through a variety of post-processing approaches. Living bacteria in the platform provided programmable functionality and life-like capabilities. According to the researchers their work reconstructed the genetic circuits of living bacteria to express chromoproteins and fluorescent proteins as two prototypes that enable the coloration of living fibers and sensing water pollutants by monitoring the amount of fluorescent protein expressed and provided a new tool for accelerating the practical applications of the emerging living material systems… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ