{"id":146869,"date":"2022-09-23T13:22:29","date_gmt":"2022-09-23T18:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/engineering-living-scaffolds-for-building-materials"},"modified":"2022-09-23T13:22:29","modified_gmt":"2022-09-23T18:22:29","slug":"engineering-living-scaffolds-for-building-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/engineering-living-scaffolds-for-building-materials","title":{"rendered":"Engineering living \u2018scaffolds\u2019 for building materials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/engineering-living-scaffolds-for-building-materials3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When the inside of a mollusk shell shimmers in sunlight, the iridescence isn\u2019t produced by colored pigments but by tiny physical structures self-assembled from living cells and inorganic components. Now, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy\u2019s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a platform to mimic this self-assembly ability by engineering living cells to act as a starting point for building composite materials.<\/p>\n<p>Engineered living <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/materials\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">materials<\/a> (ELMs) use living <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">cells<\/a> as \u201cmaterials scaffolds\u201d and are a new class of material that might open the door to self-healing materials and other advanced applications in bioelectronics, biosensing, and smart materials. Such materials could mimic emergent properties found in nature\u2014where a complex system has properties that the individual components do not have\u2014such as iridescence or strength.<\/p>\n<p>Borrowing from this complexity seen in nature, the Berkeley Lab researchers engineered a bacterium that can attach a wide range of nanomaterials to its cell surface. They can also precisely control the makeup and how densely packed the components are, creating a stable hybrid living material. The study describing their work was recently published in ACS Synthetic Biology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the inside of a mollusk shell shimmers in sunlight, the iridescence isn\u2019t produced by colored pigments but by tiny physical structures self-assembled from living cells and inorganic components. Now, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy\u2019s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a platform to mimic this self-assembly ability by [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biological","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146869","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\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}