mindlace

Now that I am a matriculated student, I would like to articulate the purpose of this educational enterprise. The world has recently begun to systemically view microbes as factories. On an individual basis bacteria and other microbes are already widely used for many industrial and research tasks, from providing surfactants and enzymes for detergent to being a vector to express a protein. These applications all follow a similar approach, where you grow a large population of free-living bacteria then lyse the batch and use some extraction technique to get the molecule of interest.

I suspect that when we more fully understand quorum sensing and other forms of microbial signalling in heterogeneous environments it will be possible to cultivate macroatomic biofilm-based structures that are useful as human artefacts.

I believe that the capacity to construct our artefactual space out of living organisms will finally allow all humans to posses the means to provide for their material needs; at a bare minimum, structures and devices built of living things have many admirable properties, not the least of which being complete recyclability.