{"id":205737,"date":"2025-02-06T11:12:18","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T17:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/researchers-engineer-living-materials-with-unique-properties"},"modified":"2025-02-06T11:12:18","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T17:12:18","slug":"researchers-engineer-living-materials-with-unique-properties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/researchers-engineer-living-materials-with-unique-properties","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Engineer Living Materials With Unique Properties"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-engineer-living-materials-with-unique-properties.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Rice University researchers have revealed novel sequence-structure-property relationships for customizing engineered living materials (ELMs), enabling more precise control over their structure and how they respond to deformation forces like stretching or compression.<\/p>\n<p>The study, published in a special issue of <em><a href=\"https:\/\/pubs.acs.org\/doi\/full\/10.1021\/acssynbio.4c00336\" target=\"_blank\">ACS Synthetic Biology<\/a><\/em>, focuses on altering protein matrices, which are the networks of proteins that provide structure to ELMs. By introducing small genetic changes, the team discovered they could make a substantial difference in how these materials behaved. These findings could open doors for advancements in tissue engineering, drug delivery and even 3D printing of living devices.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are engineering cells to create customizable materials with unique properties,\u201d said <a href=\"https:\/\/profiles.rice.edu\/faculty\/caroline-ajo-franklin\" target=\"_blank\">Caroline Ajo-Franklin<\/a>, professor of biosciences and the study\u2019s corresponding author. \u201cWhile synthetic biology has given us tools to tweak these properties, the connection between genetic sequence, material structure and behavior has been largely unexplored until now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rice University researchers have revealed novel sequence-structure-property relationships for customizing engineered living materials (ELMs), enabling more precise control over their structure and how they respond to deformation forces like stretching or compression. The study, published in a special issue of ACS Synthetic Biology, focuses on altering protein matrices, which are the networks of proteins that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1489,1902,11,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d-printing","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205737","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\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}