Using synthetic biology, we engineered a cellulose-producing bacterium that can produce eumelanin and respond to light, so that it is possible to grow a microbial leather material that is colored black or contains projected black patterns.
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References
Florea, M. et al. Engineering control of bacterial cellulose production using a genetic toolkit and a new cellulose-producing strain. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA. 113, E3431–E3440 (2016). This paper introduces the cellulose-producing K. rhaeticus strain used in our study.
Goosens, V. J. et al. Komagataeibacter tool kit (KTK): a modular cloning system for multigene constructs and programmed protein secretion from cellulose producing bacteria. ACS Synth. Biol. 10, 3422–3434 (2021). This paper describes a modular toolkit for engineering K. rhaeticus.
Baumschlager, A., Aoki, S. K. & Khammash, M. Dynamic blue light-inducible T7 RNA polymerases (Opto-T7RNAPs) for precise spatiotemporal gene expression control. ACS Synth. Biol. 6, 2157–2167 (2021). This paper describes the optogenetics system we adapted to the cellulose-producing K. rhaeticus used in our study.
Tica, J. et al. A three-node Turing gene circuit forms periodic spatial patterns in bacteria. Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.10.19.563112 (2023). A preprint that presents a system for producing Turing patterns in engineered Escherichia coli.
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This is a summary of: Walker, K. T. et al. Self-pigmenting textiles grown from cellulose-producing bacteria with engineered tyrosinase expression. Nat. Biotechnol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-024-02194-3 (2024).
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Genetically encoding colors and images into bioengineered microbial materials. Nat Biotechnol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-024-02200-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-024-02200-8
