Abstract 3059 Engineering Bacteria to Grow into Macroscopic Living Materials with Tailored Properties

Living materials synthesized by organisms, such as bones and shells, exhibit remarkable mechanical properties due to their hierarchical structure nanometer to the centimeter scales.While engineering the synthesis process could open sustainable routes to composites and plastics, there is currently no bottom-up route to do so that enables control of the composition, hierarchical structure, and mechanical properties of living materials.In this talk, I will describe how we have engineered bacteria to grow macroscopic materials and how genetic modifications can tune the structural and mechanical properties of these materials.