{"id":102559,"date":"2020-02-20T04:22:18","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T12:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/from-living-cement-to-medicine-delivering-biofilms-biologists-remake-the-material-world"},"modified":"2020-02-20T04:22:18","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T12:22:18","slug":"from-living-cement-to-medicine-delivering-biofilms-biologists-remake-the-material-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/from-living-cement-to-medicine-delivering-biofilms-biologists-remake-the-material-world","title":{"rendered":"From \u2018living\u2019 cement to medicine-delivering biofilms, biologists remake the material world"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/from-living-cement-to-medicine-delivering-biofilms-biologists-remake-the-material-world2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Engineered living materials (ELM) are designed to blur boundaries. They use cells, mostly microbes, to build inert structural materials such as hardened cement or woodlike replacements for everything from construction materials to furniture. Some, like Srubar\u2019s bricks, even incorporate living cells into the final mix. The result is materials with striking new capabilities, as the innovations on view last week at the Living Materials 2020 conference in Saarbr\u00fcken, Germany, showed: airport runways that build themselves and living bandages that grow within the body. \u201cCells are amazing fabrication plants,\u201d says Neel Joshi, an ELM expert at Northeastern University. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to use them to construct things we want.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Engineered microbes shift from making molecules to materials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Engineered living materials (ELM) are designed to blur boundaries. They use cells, mostly microbes, to build inert structural materials such as hardened cement or woodlike replacements for everything from construction materials to furniture. Some, like Srubar\u2019s bricks, even incorporate living cells into the final mix. The result is materials with striking new capabilities, as the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":417,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/417"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}