Towards engineering living functional materials

Synthetic biology has become one of the most rapidly evolving research fields, with impacts on all aspects of our daily life. Through applying engineering principles to programming biological systems, synthetic biology provides advanced techniques to program organisms to perform desired tasks, similar to machines created by humans. Today, it has enabled the development of alternative meat substitutes, biosensors for water contamination, and living fertilizers that promote plant growth. The grand challenge to bridge the concept-to-product gap is twofold: scalability and safe deployment. First, most model microorganisms cannot produce a macroscale matrix to sustain themselves as standalone devices. The field of engineered living materials (ELMs) aims to recapitulate the remarkable properties of natural biology to create novel, growable, multifunctional materials using genetically engineered organisms.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Tang, Tzu-Chieh,Ph. D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Timothy K. Lu and Neri Oxman.

• Biological Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130802

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/130802