47 research outputs found

    Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

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    Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

    Bacteria immobilization for a bioluminescent biosensor

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    Microbial biosensors provide detection of specific compounds with rapid and simple operations. In order to enhance the handling, the miniaturization and stability of the biosensor, bacteria immobilization is desirable. This paper proposes a suitable immobilization system for a microbial biosensor detecting pollutants in water. Agarose, alginate and poly-vinyl-alcohol were tested. As there is a lack of systematic studies in literature, this work tried to evaluate the effects of immobilization on biosensing performances, through comparison with suspended bacteria. Analyte detection, storage stability and the possibility of re-using immobilized bacteria were investigated
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