Engineering news
A team of engineers took advantage of the properties of live mycelium to create a new ‘engineered living material’, combining the vegetative part of a fungus with bacterial cells. The result is a new building material capable of repairing itself – and they hope it could eventually offer a sustainable alternative to high-emission building materials such as concrete.
The new material is ‘biomineralised’, meaning the living cells have produced minerals and hardened. “Biomineralised materials do not have high enough strength to replace concrete in all applications, but we and others are working to improve their properties so they can see greater usage,” said assistant professor Chelsea Heveran, corresponding author of a new paper on the work.
Compared to other similar biomaterials, which are typically only usable for a few days or weeks, the new material is reportedly useful for at least a month. “This is exciting because we would like the cells to be able to perform other functions,” Heveran said.
When bacteria live within a material for longer, their cells are able to perform several useful functions, including self-repairing when damaged and cleaning up contamination.
“Materials made from once-living organisms are beginning to enter the commercial market, but those made with organisms that are still alive have proven challenging to perfect – both because of their short viability periods and because they tend to lack the complex internal structures needed for many construction projects,” a Montana State announcement said.
To address these challenges, the team, led by first author Ethan Viles, used the fungal mycelium as a scaffold for biomineralised materials, inspired by previous uses in packaging and insulation materials. The researchers worked with the fungus species Neurospora crassa in a low-temperature manufacturing process, finding that it could be used to craft materials with a variety of complex architectures.
“We learned that fungal scaffolds are quite useful for controlling the internal architecture of the material,” Heveran said. “We created internal geometries that looked like cortical bone, but moving forward, we could potentially construct other geometries too.”
The team hopes the new biomaterial could eventually replace some building materials with high carbon footprints, such as cement, which contributes up to 8% of all carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activities. They plan to optimise the materials by coaxing the cells to live for longer and by working out how to manufacture them on a larger scale.
The work was published in Cell Reports Physical Science.
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