During the last decade, there was a drastic transition towards a more circular and sustainable bio-economy. Nevertheless, evolving and innovative technology keeps raising expectations for developing all kinds of smart materials. This project addresses a development gap in biological materials to keep up with this trend and aims to exploit nature’s strategies that have been developing and optimising for millions of years to cope and interact with its environment, yielding a smart biological material. To this end, special interest grew in mycelium materials because of their robustness, versatility and rapid growth. The major advances in bacterial synthetic biology engineering will be exploited to use bacterial strains as a chassis for sensor-containing genetic circuits that render advanced functionalities to the mycelium material through cocultivation of both partners. This creates an opportunity to meet the expectations of both the biobased economy and innovative technology by creating an engineered living material (ELM), consisting of only biological compounds and being able to interact with its environment.
Synthetic biology will be implemented to introduce bioswitches in the bacterial hosts that are activated
by environmental cues of light, temperature or chemical compounds and render an advanced functionality to the material, either by direct activity (metabolite production) or indirect effects (influencing growth or morphology of the mycelium material). Various engineered living material (ELM) products will be developed, composed of a synthetic cocultivation consortium of a filamentous fungus and a bacterial strain, ranging from consumer goods to applications in the environmental or construction sector
