Bacterial cellulose spheroids as building blocks for 3D and patterned living materials and for regeneration.
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Caro-Astorga, Joaquin
Walker, Kenneth T
Herrera, Natalia
Lee, Koon-Yang
Ellis, Tom
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Engineered living materials (ELMs) based on bacterial cellulose (BC) offer a promising avenue for cheap-to-produce materials that can be programmed with genetically encoded functionalities. Here we explore how ELMs can be fabricated in a modular fashion from millimetre-scale biofilm spheroids grown from shaking cultures of Komagataeibacter rhaeticus. Here we define a reproducible protocol to produce BC spheroids with the high yield bacterial cellulose producer K. rhaeticus and demonstrate for the first time their potential for their use as building blocks to grow ELMs in 3D shapes. Using genetically engineered K. rhaeticus, we produce functionalized BC spheroids and use these to make and grow patterned BC-based ELMs that signal within a material and can sense and report on chemical inputs. We also investigate the use of BC spheroids as a method to regenerate damaged BC materials and as a way to fuse together smaller material sections of cellulose and synthetic materials into a larger piece. This work improves our understanding of BC spheroid formation and showcases their great potential for fabricating, patterning and repairing ELMs based on the promising biomaterial of bacterial cellulose.
Date Issued
2021-08-19
Date Acceptance
2021-08-03
Citation
Nature Communications, 2021, 12 (1), pp.1-9
ISSN
2041-1723
Publisher
Nature Research
Start Page
1
End Page
9
Journal / Book Title
Nature Communications
Volume
12
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Sponsor
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34413311
PII: 10.1038/s41467-021-25350-8
Grant Number
EP/N026489/1
EP/N026489/1
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
England
Date Publish Online
2021-08-19