bims-livmat Biomed News
on Living materials
Issue of 2026–10–18
six papers selected by
Sara Trujillo Muñoz, Leibniz-Institut für Neue Materialien
  1. The archibiome: extending engineered living materials to multiscale built environments.
  2. The Potential of Self-Maintainable Living Materials.
  3. Granular Hydrogel Composites as Matrices for Engineered Living Materials.
  4. A dual-gated engineered bacterial platform for spatiotemporally controlled precise protein degradation.
  5. Semi-Artificial Photosynthesis Enables Light-Driven Biomanufacturing in Non-Photosynthetic Bacteria.
  6. Interkingdom communication 2.0: pheromone-based control between Bacillus subtilis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
  1. Front Syst Biol. 2026 ;6 1943876
    The archibiome: extending engineered living materials to multiscale built environments.
    A Sandak, W Pajerski, A Gubenšek, K Butina Ogorelec, A Černoša.
      The integration of living systems into architecture is advancing rapidly through developments in biotechnology, materials science, and design approaches grounded in regenerative principles. Engineered Living Materials (ELMs) and living artefacts demonstrate how microbial systems can be embedded within materials to enable responsiveness, metabolic activity, and adaptive functionality. However, current applications remain largely confined to discrete material components, overlooking the complex and dynamic microbial ecosystems already present within buildings. This opinion paper introduces the concept of the archibiome as a framework for extending ELMs from isolated systems to interconnected architectural environments. The archibiome conceptualizes buildings as dynamic microbial ecosystems in which engineered systems, material interfaces, and native microbial communities interact across spatial and temporal scales. While this shift offers opportunities for adaptive and regenerative design, it also introduces challenges related to system stability, environmental variability, biosafety, and regulatory constraints. Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary approaches that integrate microbial ecology, materials engineering, architectural design, and regulatory science. Ultimately, the archibiome positions microbial life as a design variable, enabling a transition toward predictive, systems-level strategies for living architecture.
    Keywords:  archibiome; built environment; engineered living materials; microbial ecology; microbiome; probiotic design; regenerative architecture; sustainable design
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fsysb.2026.1943876
  2. Adv Sci (Weinh). 2026 Oct 14. e78082
    The Potential of Self-Maintainable Living Materials.
    Mohammadsadegh Nadimifar, Tatiane Eufrásio-da-Silva, Lidia Maeso, Gorka Orive, Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz.
      Engineered living materials (ELMs) are emerging as a new class of autonomous and self-maintainable systems that integrate metabolically active organisms within structural scaffolds to create materials capable of sensing, self-repair, adaptive response, and long-term functional persistence. Unlike conventional smart materials, which remain externally programmed and limited in regenerative capacity, ELMs leverage the intrinsic capabilities of microorganisms, fungi, algae, and mammalian cells to support continuous environmental interaction and feedback-regulated behavior. These systems retain metabolically active biological components that can grow, sense, communicate, adapt, and, in some cases, self-repair and self-regenerate, positioning autonomy as the defining capacity of these next-generation materials. Recent advances in synthetic biology, including programmable gene circuits, quorum-sensing communication, and metabolic engineering, enable living components to execute closed-loop decision-making and maintain functionality with minimal external input. These capabilities are driving innovations across construction, agriculture, environmental remediation, bioenergy, and biomedicine, where ELMs enable functions such as damage-triggered mineralization, adaptive pollutant degradation, and therapeutic self-regulation. Despite this promise, key challenges remain in evolutionary stability, biocontainment, long-term viability, and scalable manufacturing. This Review examines the design principles, current challenges, and translational pathways toward self-maintainable and autonomous living materials capable of sustained operation in real-world environments.
    Keywords:  autonomous materials; biohybrid scaffolds; closed‐loop feedback regulation; engineered living materials; self‐maintainable systems; stimuli‐responsive biomaterials; synthetic biology
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.78082
  3. ACS Appl Polym Mater. 2026 Oct 09. 8(19): 18000-18009
    Granular Hydrogel Composites as Matrices for Engineered Living Materials.
    Samson Oluwagbenga Adelani, Morgan B Riffe, Jason A Burdick, R Konane Bay.
      The design of engineered living materials (ELMs) that integrate active cells offers opportunities to create dynamic, adaptive systems. However, current methods often use bulk hydrogels that can immobilize cells and limit their growth and migration, which affects their overall functionality for use as an ELM. Here, we developed a granular hydrogel composite composed of hydrogel particles (i.e., microgels), Escherichia coli (E. coli), and a cross-linkable polymer that can be crosslinked with light exposure when desired. We investigated the influence of matrix composition and incubation conditions on microcolony morphology and mechanical properties and observed that the addition of microgels to the composite results in larger bacterial colonies with roughened morphologies and that the granular hydrogel composite compressive modulus is dependent on the matrix composition and incubation conditions. To further demonstrate the potential of this system, we also showed that the granular hydrogel composites can be 3D printed into specified geometries, that the composites can be used for sustained release of bacteria, and that the un-crosslinked matrix supports chemotactic migration, producing cell density gradients that can be fixed in place with crosslinking. Overall, the granular hydrogel composites provide an approach for the fabrication of ELMs.
    Keywords:  Bacteria; confinement; engineered living materials; granular hydrogels; mechanics
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1021/acsapm.6c03807
  4. J Control Release. 2026 Oct 16. pii: S0168-3659(26)00863-1. [Epub ahead of print] 115459
    A dual-gated engineered bacterial platform for spatiotemporally controlled precise protein degradation.
    Shangwu Sun, Ruoxi Hu, Xue Zhai, Rui Bai, Jiaming Guo, Tuoyu Zhou, Tongfu Yang, Qinglan Zeng, Yilin Zhang, Jie Yu, Renke Li, Zuguang Wu, Zhaoting Li.
      Lysosome-targeting chimeras (LYTACs) have attracted much attention due to their ability to specifically target and degrade disease-related proteins on the cell membrane. However, their clinical application is limited by poor tumor specificity, systemic off-target effects, and a lack of temporal regulation. Engineered bacteria naturally home to tumors and serve as in situ production factories, but current approaches typically lack orthogonal regulation over payload release and functional activation, leading to premature exposure and suboptimal efficacy. Here, we develop a dual-gated engineered bacterial platform (DGTPB) that decouples LYTAC delivery from functional activation. Upon tumor colonization, DGTPB constitutively produces genetically encoded LYTACs, triggers their release via L-arabinose-induced bacterial lysis, and subsequently activates targeted degradation through red-light irradiation. This dual-gating design ensures high local LYTAC concentrations while minimizing systemic exposure. We demonstrate that DGTPB-mediated degradation of EGFR and PD-L1 potently suppresses tumor growth and metastasis in both melanoma and breast cancer models. Owing to its modular architecture, DGTPB is readily reprogrammable against diverse disease-associated membrane proteins by simply exchanging targeting ligands. Collectively, DGTPB establishes a versatile, programmable, and safe framework for precision extracellular targeted protein degradation, thereby providing a new tool for engineered-bacteria-based platforms in cancer immunotherapy.
    Keywords:  Engineered bacteria; Genetic engineering; Light controlled release; Protein delivery; Synthetic biology; Targeted protein degradation agent delivery
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jconrel.2026.115459
  5. Adv Sci (Weinh). 2026 Oct 14. e78265
    Semi-Artificial Photosynthesis Enables Light-Driven Biomanufacturing in Non-Photosynthetic Bacteria.
    Jie Zheng, Anqi Tong, Wenxin Li, Meng Qiao, Yang Gu, Muhammad Sohail, Shan He, Sheng Yang, Xing Zhang.
      Semiconductor biohybrid systems integrate microbial biosynthesis with semiconductor light harvesting to sustainably power energy-intensive chemical production. Although such systems have been widely explored in photosynthetic bacteria, extending them to non-photosynthetic biomanufacturing chassis such as Bacillus subtilis (B. subtilis) remains substantially more challenging, owing to peptidoglycan-induced nanoparticle aggregation and mass-transfer limitations, cytotoxicity, and inefficient interfacial electron transfer from loose adsorption between inorganic semiconductors and cells. Here, we propose a non-invasive enhancement strategy that leverages the endogenous hydrogen sulfide (H2S) pathway of the B. subtilis host and couples it with semiconductor materials to construct a semi-artificial photosynthetic biohybrid system. This system harnesses light energy to enhance endogenous nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate hydrogen (NADPH) regeneration, thereby augmenting microbial production without genetic modification of the target biosynthetic pathways. Applied to engineered B. subtilis for 2'-fucosyl lactose (2'-FL) and surfactin production, the biohybrid system increases product titres by two- to three- fold. This strategy, integrated with metabolic engineering, is effective for rapid and enhanced chemical synthesis in B. subtilis, with potential applicability to other non-photosynthetic bacteria harboring endogenous H2S pathways.
    Keywords:  bacillus subtilis; cadmium sulfide; light‐driven biomanufacturing; semiconductor biohybrid; semi‐artificial photosynthesis
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.78265
  6. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol. 2026 Oct 15. pii: 310. [Epub ahead of print]110(1):
    Interkingdom communication 2.0: pheromone-based control between Bacillus subtilis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
    Julia Döring, Tomislav Vološen, Kai Ostermann, Diana Wolf.
      Microbial communities found in nature are complex and thrive in harmony, consisting of organisms derived from several kingdoms. Hence, they need to be able to communicate by quorum-sensing molecules to co-exist in close proximity. Being able to engineer artificial interkingdom communication for biotechnological approaches, such as degradation of complex biomaterials in one fermenter using controlled signaling between microorganisms, would be beneficial. Therefore, we wanted to establish a proof of principle by enabling the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis to communicate in a controlled manner with the eukaryotic yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae by exploiting the yeast's pheromone system. We genetically modified B. subtilis to heterologously produce the α-pheromone after bacitracin induction, which in turn would activate the production of the green fluorescent protein mNeongreen upon pheromone recognition by S. cerevisiae. Co-cultivation in modified growth medium and induction of pheromone expression was successful and repeatable. Yeast activation and production of mNeongreen was visible not only by analysis but also by epifluorescence microscopy of the co-culture. This study successfully demonstrated controlled interkingdom signaling between microorganisms by leveraging their native communication systems. KEY POINTS: • Heterologous production and secretion of small peptides in Bacillus subtilis. • Interkingdom communication between bacteria and yeast. • Signaling by artificially produced pheromones.
    Keywords:   Bacillus subtilis ; Saccharomyces cerevisiae ; Co-culture; Epifluorescence microscopy; Pheromone signaling
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-026-14069-5
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