Era of Living materials

Hybrid materials combine bacterial cells with nonliving elements that can conduct electricity or emit light.

- Dr. S. S. VERMA

An artist's rendering of a bacterial cell engineered to produce amyloid nanofibers that incorporate particles such as quantum dots (red and green spheres) or gold nanoparticles.

Nature manufactures a Nmultitude of complex, hierarchical, multifunctional ‘living’ materials – including bone, wood, tissue, and organs. Advances in modern biotechnology over the past few decades have enabled scalable manufacturing of multiple ‘nonliving’ materials (e.g., chemicals, fuels, pharmaceuticals) produced by a variety of wildtype and engineered microorganisms. However, synthetic replication of hierarchical living materials largely eluded scientists and engineers until the advent of a new field-engineered living materials (ELMs). Scientists and engineers are always pursuing the goals to create a world of living materials that have the characteristics of biological systems: self-replication, self-regulation, self-healing, environmental responsiveness and self-sustainability. The fusion of synthetic biology with classical materials science has yielded breakthrough materials innovations and spawned a new biotechnology field. Engineered Living Materials (ELMs) are defined as engineered materials composed of living cells that form or assemble the material itself or modulate the functional performance of the material in some manner. The integration of functional synthetic materials and living biological entities has emerged as a new and powerful approach to create adaptive and functional structures with unprecedented performance and functional structures with unprecedented performance and functionalities. The proposed idea would push the boundaries and frontiers of synthetic biology, materials engineering, nanotechnology, biomaterials, artificial intelligence and directed evolution into new realms which can be summarized as: