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Living Cells Organize to Make Non-living Material

Boffins turn E coli into futuristic material factory

In a few years your chair could be made of a living material, according to a team of MIT boffins who have worked out how to get bacteria to help them manufacture items.


“What we’ve been able to achieve here is use living cellular communities to organize and make non-living material systems,” explained MIT associate professor Timothy Lu in a chat with The Register. “My thought is that the tools of synthetic biology can be used to program cellular systems to make new materials from the bottom up.”



In the future, this couch could be made of Bacteria


For their experiment, the researchers disabled E. coli’s ability to produce CsgA and replaced it with a genetically engineered strain that would produce it only when a molecule named AHL was present, letting them control where and when the bacteria produced a biofilm.


This gave the researchers two knobs to dial on the bacteria, and by adding or reducing the amount of AHL and aTc in the modified E. coli’s environment they could precisely control not only the production of biofilm, but also the production of biofilm that would grab hold of any gold added to the mix. By doing this, they were able to create a framework for building gold circuits.

U.S. scientists have succeeded in developing hybrids between materials that are alive and materials that are not alive.

Can living cells can be brought together with such gold particles, to make more gold?


The researchers have concluded that you can let bacteria cells form a biofilm, a film where the bacteria is close together. This biofilm can in turn bring in materials that are not alive, such small nanoparticles of gold.

These hybrids combine the advantages of living cells – as they react to their surroundings – with the benefits that other materials, such as conducting electricity or emit light.

This new technology could in future be used to make solar cells, self-healing materials or scaffolding for building tissues.

“Amyloid fibrils assembled by cells constitute a versatile scaffold that can co-organize and synthesize fluorescent [Quantum Dots] as well as gold nanowires, nanorods and nanoparticles,” the researchers write.


“The bacteria secrete small molecules they use to communicate with each other,” explained Lu. “We co-opted that comm module [and] told one group of bacteria to tell the other group of bacteria when to turn on the other’s creation of bacteria. Over time the more of the signal is present the more comes out of the received cell. Over time more and more of the material will be dominated by what the receiver cell is making.”

This is is similar to behavior seen in ants “all the time,” Lu said, and enthused: “There’s no master architect behind it. There’s emergence in this property.”

“Thus, we have demonstrated an engineered cellular platform that synthesizes and patterns self-assembling materials with controllable functionality, structure and composition,” the researchers explained in the academic paper discussing the research.

In the future, the team plans to explore the mass manufacture of materials using this method, and Lu has plans to explore the use of other “photosynthetic material” so that the assembly bacteria can make use of the sun’s energy.


“Linking up to other easily accessible resources in the environment could be one way of making materials that could self-sustain themselves in the real world,” he explained.

Given this breakthrough, what could a potential application of this research field be? Lu’s “most radical” idea is a living chair, he said.

“Everything around us is pretty much dead,” Lu continued. “Imagine having a chair where you sit on it for a long time and it remodels to support areas of stress.”

Read Article:  Register, Sverige RadioNature Journal

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