New 3-D Printed Materials Harness the Power of Bacteria

ScienceNews ^ | DECEMBER 1, 2017 | MARIA TEMMING

[nickcarraway]

Items made with ‘living ink’ could make medical supplies or clean contaminated water

A new type of 3-D printing ink has a special ingredient: live bacteria.

Materials made with this “living ink” could help clean up environmental pollution, harvest energy via photosynthesis or help make medical supplies, researchers report online December 1 in Science Advances.

This study “shows for the first time that 3-D printed bacteria can make useful materials,” says Anne Meyer, a biologist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who wasn’t involved in the work.

The newly concocted printing ink is a polymer mix called a hydrogel that is blended with bacteria and a broth of nutrients that helps bacterial cells grow and reproduce. Eventually, the bacteria use up all of this built-in sustenance, says study coauthor Manuel Schaffner, a material scientist at ETH Zurich. But the ink is porous, so dipping a 3-D printed structure in more broth can reload it with nutrients, he says.

Schaffner and colleagues printed a grid embedded with a breed of bacteria called Pseudomonas putida, which eats the hazardous chemical phenol. When the researchers placed this lattice in phenol-contaminated water, the bacteria completely purified the water in just a few days..

[ifinnegan]

Cool stuff.

[UCANSEE2]

Make up a bought 20 tons of the stuff and spread it all over DC.

[Brooklyn Attitude]

I worked on very similar projects 20 years ago except it didnt involve 3D printing. What they are going to find is that this might work in the lab but as soon as their material is exposed to a non sterile environment their matrix and organisms will rapidly be taken over by rapidly growing environmental organisms. If they read the scientific literature they would know this.