(691a) Polysaccharide Fibers As Living and Non-Living Material Building Blocks

Polysaccharides are main structural components in plant cell walls, filamentous fungi cell walls, and many bacterial biofilms. Polysaccharides are good building blocks for tough materials because of their high molecular weight and abundance of functional groups available for physical bonding among polysaccharide chains. In this presentation I will talk about two of our group’s recent polysaccharide-centric collaborative projects within the Engineered Living Materials Institute at Cornell. Within the context of biomanufacturing, we establish composition-mechanical property relationships for bacterial polysaccharide-based materials manufactured with a newly characterized strain of Sphingomonas, establishing the impact of both strain engineering and purification routes. Within the context of plant mechanics, we establish structure-mechanical property relationships for the leaf epidermis utilizing a simple fiber network model and experiments on different strains of the model plant Arabidopsis.