Your Future Couch Could Be Made of Living Cells

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are developing living materials from biological particles that could be used in everyday items.

Image: MIT

By Samantha Murphy Kelly2014-04-07 02:37:56 UTC

What if the materials we are accustomed to using could change, move, live?

Consider this: A shirt that could self heal and grow back a sleeve if it rips off. A couch that can grow when you want to rest your feet. A self-sustaining table you'd have to water and keep in the sunlight, just like a plant.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are developing "living materials" from biological particles that could be used in everyday items.

"We are trying to make living materials compared, so people could use them instead of the non-living materials that are popular today," Timothy Lu, associate professor at MIT, told Mashable. "We want to leverage the ability of biology. With things such as trees and bone are materials made without human intervention, we want to grow similar materials from the ground up."

Lu believes this method would be more environmentally friendly and require less energy from robots building things in factories.

The researchers recently completed a proof of concept that was meant to be a first step towards the creation of 'living materials' or cell-based factories for materials.

"We modified E. coli bacteria to form biofilms and engineered them to contain artificial genetic programs that allowed us to control the materials they made by adding external chemicals," Lu said. "By changing when and where we added these chemicals, we were able to create biofilms that formed different materials."

The researchers also designed bacteria that could talk to each other and coordinate the formation of different materials, without human input.

"Using this platform, we made biofilms that could bind to gold nanoparticles to conduct electricity or to bind to quantum dots and emit fluorescence," he added.

However, there are many challenges standing in the way of using this in everyday items.

"We are still technologically far away from this becoming a reality, but we could see it in the next five to 10 years," Lu said. "There are also regulatory issues and society ones too — people might not be quick to adopt something like this. If we could use live cells to grow the material and then remove those cells from the final product, I think more people would be willing to give it a try."

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