Engineered living materials promise to aid efforts in human health, energy and environmental remediation. Now they can be built big and customized with less effort.
Bioscientists at Rice University have introduced centimeter-scale, slime-like colonies of engineered bacteria that self-assemble from the bottom up. They can be programmed to soak up contaminants from the environment or to catalyze biological reactions, among many possible applications.
The creation of autonomous engineered living materials —or ELMs—has been a goal of bioscientist Caroline Ajo-Franklin since long before she joined Rice in 2019.
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