Repeated photolithographic and etching processes allow the production of multileveled polymer microstructures that can be used as templates to produce bacterial cellulose with defined surfaces on demand. By applying this approach, the bacterial cellulose surface obtains new properties and its use for culturing neural stem cells cellulose substrate topography influences the cell growth in a defined manner.
This study aims to develop an effective method to control motile microorganisms and enable their manipulation as functional 'live micro/nano robots'. A novel strategy based on Fe O nanoparticle-doped alginate hydrogel is developed to fashion an artificial extracellular matrix (ECM) for microbial cells (e.g., Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Flavobacterium heparinum). During this strategy, a single layer of alginate hydrogel is coated around the microbial cells doped with Fe O nanoparticles to form the alg-mag-cells. Transmission electron microscopy shows that Fe O nanoparticles are uniformly distributed in the hydrogel shell. Together with maintaining the cell activity and metabolism, the hydrogel coated microbial cells demonstrate high magnetic responsiveness in an external magnetic field and are able to form micro-scaled patterns using the magnetic template designed in this study. This strategy provides a building block to fabricate advanced biological models, medical therapeutic products, and non-medical biological systems using different microorganisms.
Biofabrication, referring
to engineering of complex constructs
with desired features using living biotemplates, is a new fascinating
technology. Microbes as exceptional templates provide a biomimetic
approach to obtain amazingly ordered nano-, micro-, and meso-structured
materials owing to diversity in their sizes and shapes, presence of
a variety of chemical functional groups on their surfaces, and intrinsically
porous structure of their cell walls. As biotemplates, microbes can
be utilized for synthesis of novel bionanomaterials, microdevices,
and micro/nanorobots, etc. by using various bottom-up approaches.
Here, we summarized the recent advancements in biofabrication based
on microbes, from nano to mesoscopic size, from viruses to true-living
microbes, from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, and from unicellular to
multicellular microbes. It reviews the role of viruses, bacteria,
fungi, and algae as structural templates in biofabrication of various
bionanomaterials for diverse applications and provides new insights
for future development of fabrication technology by using these microbes.
Microbes are important part of life that vary in sizes and shapes, diverse surface chemistry and biology, and porous nature of their cell walls. Besides their importance in industrial processes such as fermentation, these serve as biotemplates and provide a biomimetic approach for fabrication of multifarious complex constructs with predefined features, ordered composites and hybrid nanomaterials, microdevices, and micro/nanorobots through various strategies. The template or building blocks for such approaches can be bacterial, algal, and fungal cells or virus particles. Here, we have summarized recent advancements in biofabrication based on live microbes. Using engineering approaches and suitable methods, live microbes can be manipulated as functional Bmicro/nanodevices and -robots^to further perform biological functions such as replication, distribution, motility, formation of colonies, and secretion of metabolites at will. Biofabrication based on microbes provides effective methods to control and manipulate microbes as functional live building blocks to create micro/nanodevices and -robots for biomedical and energy applications.
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