Engineering Living ‘Scaffolds’ for Building Materials

Date posted
Funding Agency
(Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have engineered living cells so they can act as a starting point for building composite materials. Using living cells as "materials scaffolds" could lead to a new class of materials, called engineered living materials, that might open the door to self-healing materials and other applications in bioelectronics, biosensing, and smart materials.