Engineers create ‘living materials’ inspired by kombucha microbes
Kombucha – the trendy fermented drink beloved by health freaks and hipsters alike – has inspired researchers to grow a ‘living material’ capable of carrying out a range of tasks, such as detecting pollutants or purifying water.
Engineers from MIT and Imperial College London made the material using a SCOBY, or symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. Usually used as a mother culture for making fermented kombucha tea, in this instance it was used to produce cellulose embedded with enzymes that can perform a variety of functions.
Dubbed Syn-SCOBY, the material was made by combining a strain of laboratory yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a type of bacteria called
Komagataeibacter that the team had isolated from a kombucha mother. The
Komagataeibacter bacteria in the culture produced large quantities of tough cellulose that served as a scaffold to house the yeast and any enzymes it produced.
As the yeast is easily modified, the researchers were able to engineer it to do various things, such as produce enzymes that glow in the dark, or sense pollutants or pathogens in the environment.
“We foresee a future where diverse materials could be grown at home or in local production facilities, using biology rather than resource-intensive centralised manufacturing,” said Dr Timothy Lu, an associate professor in MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science department.
The team is now looking into using Syn-SCOBY for biomedical or food applications, such as engineering the yeast cells to produce antimicrobials, or proteins that could be eaten by humans.