Title: Engineered Living Materials: From 3D printable enzyme plastics to living bacterial microreactors

Abstract:

Engineered Living Materials (ELMs) present an exciting opportunity to integrate and scale outputs from synthetic biology. ELMs are currently being developed for a wide variety of applications, which range from gut microbiome re-engineering to fungal-bacterial composite building materials. Ideally, the living component of an ELM or its output should interface with and modulate the bulk structure of material, by driving assembly or chemical processes across multiple length scales. Accordingly, we present recent and ongoing research on the development of smart highly fabricable composite biomaterials and engineered living materials with tuneable emergent properties. Specifically, we describe the development of enzymatically-active plastics and membranes with robust high fidelity structures [1, 2], a new class of bioink comprising an oxidoreductase-mediated interpenetrating network (IDE) gel with thermoresponsive shape changing properties, and a 3D bioprinted living bacterial microreactor that is capable of detoxifying organophosphates under flow.

1.         Day, G.J., et al., A rationally designed supercharged protein-enzyme chimera self-assembles in situ to yield bifunctional composite textiles. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2021, 13.

2.         Perriman, A.W., et al., Three-dimensional printable enzymatically active plastics. ACS Applied Polymer Materials, 2021.

Bio:

Adam Perriman is a Professor of Bioengineering at the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Bristol, and Director of the Bristol Centre for Bioprinting. He is internationally distinguished for his pioneering research on the construction and study of novel synthetic biomolecular systems, and his research interests span the fields of chemistry, biophysics and tissue engineering. His contributions to this field of interdisciplinary science led to him being named a Wellcome Trust Frontiers Innovator in 2015, and in 2016, he was awarded the British Biophysical Society Young Investigator's Award and Medal. In 2019, he was named a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow. In 2017 he founded the cell therapy biotech company CytoSeek, which has raised in excess of $5.8M USD.