Combining the powers of the living and the inanimate, an interdisciplinary team from The University of Texas at Dallas has embedded genetically modified yeast into a synthetic gel to create a novel, shape-changing material designed to grow under specific biochemical or physical conditions.
“This is definitely a case where the product is more than the sum of its parts,” said Taylor Ware MS’11, PhD’13, assistant professor of bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and corresponding author of a paper published in January in Science Advances, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s open-access journal.
The idea to use the reproductive growth of cells to drive shape change within an inanimate container began with an old, reliable standby: baker’s yeast, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
