{"id":118524,"date":"2021-01-14T20:24:13","date_gmt":"2021-01-15T04:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/inspired-by-kombucha-tea-engineers-create-living-materials"},"modified":"2021-01-14T20:24:13","modified_gmt":"2021-01-15T04:24:13","slug":"inspired-by-kombucha-tea-engineers-create-living-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/inspired-by-kombucha-tea-engineers-create-living-materials","title":{"rendered":"Inspired by kombucha tea, engineers create \u2018living materials\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/inspired-by-kombucha-tea-engineers-create-living-materials.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Engineers at MIT and Imperial College London have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the \u201ckombucha mother\u201d used to ferment tea.<\/p>\n<p>Using this mixture, also called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), the researchers were able to produce cellulose embedded with enzymes that can perform a variety of functions, such as sensing environmental pollutants. They also showed that they could incorporate yeast directly into the material, creating \u201cliving materials\u201d that could be used to purify water or to make \u201csmart\u201d packaging materials that can detect damage.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe foresee a future where diverse materials could be grown at home or in local production facilities, using biology rather than resource-intensive centralized manufacturing,\u201d says Timothy Lu, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/biological+engineering\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">biological engineering<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Engineers at MIT and Imperial College London have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the \u201ckombucha mother\u201d used to ferment tea. Using this mixture, also called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), the researchers were able to produce cellulose embedded with [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118524","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}