In conclusion, our hydrogel-based spatiotemporal control strategy of physicochemical biocontainment reduces a critical barrier to deploying #ELMs

What are remaining challenges? Achieving suspension culture comparable metabolic activity and further extension of cell retention in #ELMs / #MALMs 🧪

A schematic showing comparative metabolic activity of suspension cultures and ELMs with physicochemical biocontainment. Source: https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.10001975/v1

How about the metabolic activity in #ELMs?

We found ~40% increase in fermentation in MAA-containing #MALMs

Cell retention and metabolic activity increases are significant for such applications as releasing drug molecules over time using living therapeutics materials or biocontained bioreactors

A four panel graphic showing macroscopic view of engineered living materials. Source: https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.10001975/v1

What did we find in our experiments?

We found that MAA-containing #ELMs enable tunable biocontainment of yeast after immersion in 70 vol.% ethanol, leading to the formation of a time-dependent cell-free zone

The resulting yeast-laden #MALMs show cell retention of ~ 100 h vs ~ 24 h in controls

Physical Confinement Impacts Cellular Phenotypes within Living Materials Additive manufacturing allows three-dimensional printing of polymeric materials together with cells, creating living materials for applications in biomedical research and biotechnology. However, an un...

While doing 3D printed brewery project we realized that though we can create #MALMs, cells escape from 3D printed matrices in ~ 24 h

Hence the motivation of new preprint - to improve the cells retention and metabolic activity in #ELMs / #MALMs

Excited to share our @chemrxiv.org preprint on metabolically active living materials #MALMs with physciochemical biocontainment🧵

Why do we need #MALMs?

Because as @economist.com posits additive manufacturing is potentially a better way to make drinks and drugs

We argue #MALMs are the key for it