(53d) Living Composite Materials of Cells, Polymeric Scaffolds, and Artificial Proteins

Natural biological materials – such as wood, bone, and skin –are composites of living cells, effector biomolecules, and a variety of scaffolds. The living, autonomous nature of these natural composite matter realizes emergent properties, for example, self-regulation, adaptation to environmental changes, and capacity to self-repair a wound site. In the last century, our ability to generate synthetic materials and to understand the structure-property relationship has remarkably improved, yet incorporation of the living character to them is still limited. In this regards, designing and engineering artificial living composite materials would open a possibility to bridge the gap between the natural and synthetic matter and generate unprecedented functionalities. In this presentation, I will present the development of two different types of living composite materials of cells, polymeric scaffold, and artificial proteins. We engineered genetically tractable microbes – E. coli and B. subtilis–to produce artificial proteins. I will talk about a series of self-assembling proteins that form networks in situ thereby reinforce the entirety of the composite materials and 3D-printable living materials that can potentially be useful for portable protein therapeutics.