Generalizable Metamaterials Design Techniques Inspire Efficient Mycelial Materials Inverse Design

Fungal mycelial materials can mimic numerous nonrenewable materials; they are even capable of outperforming certain materials at their own applications. Fungi’s versatility makes mock leather, bricks, wood, foam, meats, and many other products possible. That said, there is currently a critical need to develop efficient mycelial materials design techniques. In mycelial materials, and the wider field of biomaterials, design is primarily limited to costly forward techniques. New mycelial materials could be developed faster and cheaper with robust inverse design techniques, which are not currently used within the field. However, computational inverse design techniques will not be tractable unless clear and concrete design parameters are defined for fungi, derived from genotype and bulk phenotype characteristics. Through mycelial materials case studies and a comprehensive review of metamaterials design techniques, we identify three critical needs that must be addressed to implement computational inverse design in mycelial materials. These critical needs are the following: 1) heuristic search/optimization algorithms, 2) efficient mathematical modeling, and 3) dimensionality reduction techniques. Metamaterials researchers already use many of these computational techniques that can be adapted for mycelial materials inverse design. Then, we suggest mycelium-specific parameters as well as how to measure and use them. Ultimately, based on a review of metamaterials research and the current state of mycelial materials design, we synthesize a generalizable inverse design paradigm that can be applied to mycelial materials or related design fields.