Bacterial cellulose spheroids as building blocks for 3D and patterned living materials and for regeneration

Bacterial cellulose is a promising cheap-to-produce programmable engineered living material. Here the authors present a method for production of spheroids for use as engineerable building blocks able to sense and respond to chemical inputs. 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.

Automated summary

Bacterial cellulose is a promising and cheap-to-produce programmable living material. Researchers have developed a method to produce spheroids from bacterial cellulose, which can be used as engineerable building blocks capable of sensing and responding to chemical inputs. Through genetic engineering, functionalized BC spheroids were created and utilized to produce patterned BC-based ELMs that can signal within the material and detect chemical inputs. This work demonstrates the potential of BC spheroids in fabricating, patterning, and repairing ELMs based on bacterial cellulose.