Scientists are currently developing "living materials" from biological particles, which can be used in everyday things.
The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to make living materials, which they believe will be more environmentally friendly and require less energy, Mashable reported.
Timothy Lu, associate professor at MIT, said that they want to leverage the ability of biology and they want to grow materials from the ground up with things such as trees and bones without human intervention.
Lu said that they have modified E. coli bacteria to form biofilms and engineered them to contain artificial genetic programs that allowed them to control the materials they made by adding external chemicals.
He said that they made biofilms that could bind to gold nanoparticles to conduct electricity or to bind to quantum dots and emit fluorescence.
Lu added that if they could use live cells to grow the material and then remove those cells from the final product, more people would be willing to give it a try.
