Scientists create living materials out of famous beverage ingredients

Scientists recently created a series of “living materials” made out of… kombucha! The ingredients of the popular tea drink were fermented with a symbiotic culture of yeast and bacteria to create the materials.

“Kombucha mother”, as the fungus is sometimes called can do a lot more than just be used in beverages, scientists have found.

Researchers successfully came up with engineered living materials (ELMs) by modifying the contents of the culture. Such materials may be used for an array of purposes in the future - including sensing light, and detecting contaminants.

And scientists claim that these materials can be made easily at home, in one’s kitchen.

The work is based on a 2014 MIT project whereby researchersengineered “Escherichia coli” cells to create biofilms containing non-living components.

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But the new materials in that case had no practical purposes, unlike this new kombucha flavoured project. Scientists wanted to achieve this at a much larger scale, which is why they imbibed kombucha, or rather its parental culture into the experiment.

How did they do create ELMs? The researchers took up a strain of laboratory yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and combined it with the bacterium Komagataeibacter rhaeticus. This wasn’t easy for they had to get the ratio right. But they eventually found it and came up with the engineered culture, which they’re called Syn-SCOBY.

The bacteria can perform a number of functions, like sensing chemicals in pollutants, or creating a protein capable of glowing in the presence of blue light, among many, as reported by ScienceAlert. The study was published in Nature Materials.