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ENGINEERED LIVING MATERIALS

Living building blocks

Nature Materials volume 21, pages 382–383 (2022)Cite this article

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A prototypical biocomposite block comprising a blend of bacteria, fungi and feedstock can be assembled into human-sized, living structures with self-healing and environmental sensing capabilities.

The climate crisis and the increasing attention to the issue have brought forward a global push for ‘green’ buildings built from sustainable materials. A major development in this area is microbial-based biocomposite building materials that utilize agricultural byproducts, which would otherwise be disposed of as waste. Now, writing in Nature Materials, McBee and colleagues1 describe the scalable production of fungi–bacteria-based biocomposite blocks grown from plant-derived waste. These blocks have regenerative and sensing capabilities and can be moulded and stacked into human-sized structures, thus having great potential to serve as living building materials.

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Fig. 1: Engineering of sensing and responsive biomaterials.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation (SynCTI), Synthetic Biology Translational Research Programme, and Department of Biochemistry of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Kwok Soon Wun, In Young Hwang & Matthew Wook Chang

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  1. Kwok Soon Wun
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  2. In Young Hwang
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  3. Matthew Wook Chang
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Correspondence to Matthew Wook Chang.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Wun, K.S., Hwang, I.Y. & Chang, M.W. Living building blocks. Nat. Mater. 21, 382–383 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01227-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01227-z

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