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Metabolic interactions within gut microbiota play a vital role in human health and disease. Targeting metabolically interacting bacteria could provide effective treatments; however, obtaining functional bacteria remains a significant challenge due to the complexity of gut microbiota. Here, we developed a facile droplet-based approach to isolate and enrich functional gut bacteria that could utilize metabolites from an engineered butyrate-producing bacteria (EBPB) of anti-obesity potential. This involves the high throughput formation of single-bacteria droplets, followed by culturing “droplets” on agar plates to form discrete single-cell colonies. This approach eliminates the need for sophisticated s instruments to sort droplets and thus allows the operation hosted in a traditional anaerobic chamber. In comparison to the traditional culture, the droplet-based approach obtained a community of substantially higher diversity and evenness. Using the conditioned plates containing metabolites from the EBPB supernatant, we obtained gut bacteria closely associated or interacting with the EBPB. These include anaerobic Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, which are often used as probiotics. The study illustrates the potential of our approach in the search for the associated bacteria within the gut microbiota and retrieving those yet-to-be cultured.

The development of high‐temperature structural materials, such as ceramics, is limited by their extremely high melting points and the difficulty in building complicated architectures. Four‐dimensional (4D) printing helps enhance the geometrical flexibility of ceramics. However, ceramic 4D printing systems are limited by the separate processes for shape and material transformations, low accuracy of morphing systems, low resolution of ceramic structures, and their time‐intensive nature. Here, a paradigm for a one‐step shape/material transformation, high‐2D/3D/4D‐precision, high‐efficiency, and scalable 4D additive–subtractive manufacturing of shape memory ceramics is developed. Original/reverse and global/local multimode shape memory capabilities are achieved using macroscale SiOC‐based ceramic materials. The uniformly deposited Al2O3‐rich layer on the printed SiOC‐based ceramic lattice structures results in an unusually high flame ablation performance of the complex‐shaped ceramics. The proposed framework is expected to broaden the applications of high‐temperature structural materials in the aerospace, electronics, biomedical, and art fields.

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