Endowing textiles with self-repairing ability through the fabrication of composites with a bacterial biofilm

Abstract

To address the increasing environmental footprint of the fast-growing textile industry, self-repairing textile composites have been developed to allow torn or damaged textiles to restore their morphological, mechanical, and functional features. A sustainable way to create these textile composites is to introduce a coating material that is biologically derived, biodegradable, and can be produced through scalable processes. Here, we fabricated self-repairing textile composites by integrating the biofilms of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria into conventional knitted textiles. The major structural protein component in E. coli biofilm is a matrix of curli fibers, which has demonstrated extraordinary abilities to self-assemble into mechanically strong macroscopic structures and self-heal upon contact with water. We demonstrated the integration of biofilm through three simple, fast, and scalable methods: adsorption, doctor blading, and vacuum filtration. We confirmed that the composites were breathable and mechanically strong after the integration, with improved Young’s moduli or elongation at break depending on the fabrication method used. Through patching and welding, we showed that after rehydration, the composites made with all three methods effectively healed centimeter-scale defects. Upon observing that the biofilm strongly attached to the textiles by covering the extruding textile fibers from the self-repair failures, we proposed that the strength of the self-repairs relied on both the biofilm’s cohesion and the biofilm-textile adhesion. Considering that curli fibers are genetically-tunable, the fabrication of self-repairing curli-expressing biofilm-textile composites opens new venues for industrially manufacturing affordable, durable, and sustainable functional textiles.

Geometric modeling of phase ordering for the isotropic–smectic A phase transition

“…This order parameter coupling decreases the free energy of the system to result in a smectic A phase at minimal quenches from the stable disordered state. Polymeric and biological liquid-crystalline materials, being part of the lyo/thermotropic spectrum, also share the preferred native mode of fiberformation, as seen in their in vivo and in vitro states (Matthews et al, 2002;Viney, 2004;Dierking and Al-Zangana, 2017;Renner-Rao et al, 2019;Deng et al, 2021;Harrington and Fratzl, 2021;Tortora and Jost, 2021;Cai et al, 2023;Zhang et al, 2023), which reinforces the hypothesis of smecticity enhancing the material's mechanical properties through increased alignment.…”