 and welcome to Tomorrow Science Discovery 2.02. Today we're talking to Mary Michael Sharia about synthetic living materials and synthetic biology. But my name is Lisa and I've got Jared with me today. We're going to be hosting this interview and we want to get straight into it. So Mary Michael is a scientific engineering associate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and she's working really cool stuff like synthetic biology and how we can make engineered living materials. So Mary Michael I just wanted to start off by asking you why are engineering living materials such a cool thing to work on and what are the natural materials that they're trying to replicate? Yeah so they're a really interesting thing to work on largely because we have a great ability to make hard materials and static materials but we're not very good at making things that are self-healing or self-assembling. You know everything we make like concrete and steel requires a lot of input on our half and it is what it is at the end. But living materials have the ability to grow and self-heal. They have the ability to make multiple materials within a single vat and so you can think about things like bone or nacre which is that beautiful inner iridescent layer of a mollusks shell and these things are amazing because they have the ability to be extremely strong. They have the ability to have fracture resistance so they don't you know when you crack them they slide or try to prevent the crack from propagating but at the same time they also can have some flexibility. They can have the ability to grow or heal a crack that does form and also just self-assembling. You know there's no human being going in and putting the parts in one by one they just grow on their own so we want to mimic that ability and basically where it comes from is the idea of hierarchical assembly so a mollusks shell basically has all these different levels of organizations down on the you know nanometer level. It's got these tiny little particles and biomaterial which is just kind of like sticky material and it puts those together in a way and then those that layer kind of grows into larger platelets and those platelets grow into the larger shell and so by having all of these different layers of organization it ends up having emergent properties that say the sand or the biomaterial on their own absolutely don't have. The biomaterials just squishy the sand is just particles but together they make this incredibly iridescent beautiful and strong shell and so we want to try to mimic that. So kind of like living composite materials like carbon fiber but with living cells and materials that surround them. That's cool. So what are the current state of engineered living materials that we have at the moment? Are we even close to making artificial bone or anything like that? Yeah in some ways we are it depends on kind of the different field but you know we're still in the stage where we're learning to control it and we're learning to build it on different levels so we are getting to a point where we're kind of good at the micron nanometer scale ordering and we're kind of good at the big you know millimeter centimeter ordering but getting all the different levels to come together getting them to create themselves without us having to say 3D print the different organizational levels that is still a little ways away. There's also just the aspect of you know anything that we are going to try to apply in the world is going to need a lot of verification and control and understanding before we just release it out there. You know if you're talking about something that's going to be used in civil engineering you need to know that that's not going to break down and your wall or whatever your your filtration system is going to hurt people because it wasn't tested enough. So that is one of the big things about synthetic biology that slows things down. We can make stuff in the lab but we really still have a long way to go to prove their real world application in some of these things but as far as actually building the materials you know there's a lot of work being done to use cells to mineralize things around them so there's natural systems in a lot of bacteria like cyanobacteria where really when they're just in nature they take up calcium carbonate and form little rock-like structures little crystals around themselves naturally and so there are other bacteria that can't do that and so sometimes we transfer the ability from one to the other and we also are looking at okay what other materials could we attach to the cell surface to get that kind of ordering and that's where my work starts to come in where I start to use S-layer proteins which are these really cool proteins that are on the surface of a cell and they're found on almost all bacteria and it's basically like chain mail it's this really highly ordered protein structure and there it is and and this is the one from colobacter chrysentis which is a little freshwater bug that you can find all over the place and basically this little chain mail forms on the surface of the cell for a lot of different reasons sometimes it's protection sometimes it helps it move a lot of times it's a molecular sieve so it helps you know trap or prevent things from going in or out of the cell and so it's basically just this natural protective layer but what we have discovered is that by inserting different things at various points within this layer you can then create attachment points all over the cell and so them you know by using the S-layer we have so many attachment points like thousands upon thousands and then you can start attaching different things to the surface of the cell whether it be a hard material like a nanoparticle or calcium carbonate or something that will grow a more hard stiff material or something like a biopolymer which is similar to what you know you see in a lot of shells and it's it's sticky it can form hydrogels or protective gooey layers and so you know you just pick and choose what you want to bind to the cell and then the cell just basically uptakes it out of the solution and starts growing into a larger and larger material and depending on what you're trying to achieve you would bind different materials based on where my lab is right now we are testing different materials and then using different kind of techniques like atomic force microscopy which honestly is basically taking an extremely fine stick and poking it like we have not moved beyond caveman times or we're literally just talking things with the stick but basically we build this this material of say nanoparticles and cells that grows on its own it heals itself and then we poke it with a stick and we see how strong it is how flexible it is does it just break apart when we poke it or does it hold together does it depress and then expand kind of like memory foam in your bed you know and then we start to see what kind of properties arise from different attachment points different materials different cell lines and then we start to see okay can we order it and that's where we're at right now is trying to explore what happens when we attach things to the cell so it sounds like your group has had multiple different experiments going on with this this one organism that you're using so I think the best way to kind of tackle each of these is I'd love to go into each of these individual components that you mentioned so actually modifying the SLA protein and then what you added to it so you guys talked about how you just mentioned you guys added different proteins to it and then also nano materials as well so let's talk about those two things separately but first of all can you tell us a little bit about how you actually how does one actually modify a protein that exists in in a in a bacteria like did you go in there and and shove the protein in there poke it really hard again yeah um can you tell us a little bit about that yeah so um all the work that's really done with microbial synthetic biology is starts on the dna level and so instead of you know the final point where you have a protein that is going to have a function we actually go back to the code that writes that protein similar to if you wanted to modify a program on your computer you know you can try to modify the program but really what you want to do is go back to the original source code change that and then the program becomes different over time and so what we do is we basically first identify the gene that makes the protein so in this case for colobacter it's this gene called rsaa which doesn't really stand for anything microbiologists and molecular biologists just like to make up really complex letter acronyms for things and so that gene basically in the cell will create a protein that then moves the cell surface attaches and crystallizes and makes that hexagonal picture that you saw before all over the cell surface so what we do is we go in look at that gene and see okay where could I stick things inside that gene that will still allow it to make the protein and the protein will still create the structure that it naturally creates but now with a little loop sticking out of it that has a binding event on it so in the case of this image what we were trying to do was attach a fluorescent protein so fluorescent proteins are really really great in molecular biology because they're just a tool to tell us did this work basically did this thing attach and if it did it's going to glow very simple you know very easy to tell what it is and so in this case these cells are displaying something called spy tag and the fluorescent protein has something called spy catcher on it this is basically a type of protein that when spy tag and spy catcher see each other in the solution they're going to bind together and so if spy tag actually is in rsaa on the cell surface and being displayed then the spy catcher fluorescent protein floating around is going to come in and attach to the cell surface basically telling us that yes the genetic modification that we made actually resulted in a functional protein on the cell surface so what you see here is in that top layer we just stain the cells with a dye to show that cells are there first step just so when i look at it by microscopy i know whether i'm actually just looking at cells or am i just looking at blank space and then the second layer shows did the protein bind to my modified s layer and so you see in the first three columns it's either missing spy tag or it's missing spy catcher so one half of the binding event whether it's on the cell or on the fluorescent protein is missing so therefore you don't see any fluorescence because nothing came together and then in the last you know column four row two you had both spy catcher and spy tag so the s layer has the binding peptides on the surface the fluorescent protein has the attachment protein and so they came together and you see that the purple fluorescence appeared and then the bottom row is just the merging of those two both the just dying the cells inside the cell and then the fluorescent protein attaching to the cell surface and what's cool is that you can actually tell that the dye is inside the cell and the fluorescent protein is attached to the outside of the cell because you see that the purple is kind of an outline of the cell and the blue is on the interior and we do this by basically when we look at the microscope we kind of go down and find a point where it splits the the cell in half and so you can see the inside and then the outside of the cell at the same time and this basically tells us that yes the binding event happened it did fluoresce but it's also extracellular which is really important for biomaterials sometimes when you make these proteins they get stuck inside the cell and that doesn't really help us in the case of s layers it's on the surface of the cell which allows us to you know modify and change the environment around the cell and so that was what was really important about that image and I just have to say that one of my super RAs Lisa Yoon was the one who took that image she got really really good at doing confocal microscopy which both saved me a lot of time and made beautiful beautiful images like that so I have a question from our chat room from hennys vorwurp and twitch which is actually extremely similar to a question I was going to ask which is are you all are you finding this using nature structural tricks or are you just trying to mechanically create biological structures that can be used in engineering yeah so um it's actually kind of a combination of the two um what we first do is look for natural biological abilities of the cell because if the cell can do something similar to what we are aiming for it's probably going to do it better than anything I can design so why not just exploit that but then you know and that's the case of an s layer it's a highly ordered extremely stable structure on the surface of the cell that I can then use um but from there it gets more into rational engineering and so you know the idea of those two proteins that do the binding events by tag and spy catcher that actually was originally a natural protein that then somebody engineered to be able to split and come back together and then when we're talking about what we're attaching to the cell that is highly engineered as well one of the big things is nanoparticles um and those are something that are engineered in our lab they are things like cadmium sulfide um little center cores that are then wrapped in materials that help it attach and so that is a very engineered thing and then also you know right now we are still just looking at what happens when we and when we put all these parts together but eventually we would hope to have enough design rules come out of that that we could predict and plan what kind of materials trying to make you know if I attach you know this kind of nanoparticle to an S-layer that has this particular structure okay I know what kind of mechanical properties are going to arise from that material and that's still a little ways off that's what we're exploring now but that does get into the point where we'd hope to eventually be able to rationally engineer all the parts and then build a material that we understand fully I want to get back to the spy catcher and spy tag system that you mentioned I mean it's kind of seems like it's the basis of of this whole research to me it kind of feels like if I had to think of a real world analogy it's kind of like velcro like the cells are expressing the protein which is kind of like the hooks of the velcro and then the you know the materials that you want to add to the cell have like the fluffy part of the velcro and so you know they come in and they and they stick to to the surface of the bacteria um so I want to talk about what we can attach to the fluffy part of the velcro like we mentioned talking about you mentioned cadmium sulfide which I think is that a um is that a semiconductor what kind of um properties will we get out of you know attaching something like that to the cell so um the cadmium sulfide nanoparticles we we use that more just because it's a very good bright quantum dot basically it you know when we shine a certain laser light on it it's going to glow very very brightly and so it tells us that yes it's a hard material it attached it's um so it's more for diagnosis of what kind of hard materials you can make and we do different linker lengths we do different sizes of nanoparticles to see but you know as far as mechanical properties something that small um isn't going to impart too many nano um kind of nano level mechanical properties though we do see some which is interesting um and that's kind of a work that we're exploring right now but uh so the spy tags by catcher it's definitely like velcro because you have a little tiny small part and a really big protein they come together but the only difference is that it's irreversible so it forms um a bond basically that pretty much cannot be broken it takes a heck of a lot of energy to break which is really important in um engineered living materials because you know most proteins have what's called an on off rate and um so things are going to come on they're going to come off and it's you know it's unstable because of that but this is very very stable which is what you want in a material because you don't want your material changing hopefully without your control yeah totally there's a really good question um in the chat room here actually in terms of figuring out uh what we can attach to these to the spy catcher as spy tag system um honey's of all work is asking can this be done manually or can ai be utilized to help you in your work i guess in terms of finding out what might be useful to attach or um different new and emerging properties of that system yeah for sure so um i think right now we're still defining the rules and so understanding how the binding event occurs how different s layers which have different geometries affect that a binding event or different locations within the s layer different materials how they come on and off for example a protein attaches to the cell extremely fast but a biopolymer like a hydrogel like material finds um a little bit slower and so i think you know right now we're still so new that we wouldn't really know what to tell the machine learning to do and what to look for but um once we define a little bit more about the rules that apply to these engineered living materials and we have a little bit more understanding then yes it will be um very important to start using those kind of tools to expand all the options so that we don't have to manually test every single variant we can kind of look at them the scope that the machine learning or the ai tells us what could work and what doesn't and then go try to do real world applications people are doing that in synthetic biology now with some systems that are better understood but honestly the the the big sticking point that sometimes happens and this is somewhat related to the recent Nobel Prize is that a lot of times what we predict doesn't actually work in nature nature goes off and does its own thing and it does not care what you think um francis arnold recently said in a talk that she she tries not to put too much thought into these experiments occasionally because nature does not care about your algorithms nature does not care about your predictions it's going to do whatever it wants so a lot of times we do these predictive models for biology and then when we actually go in the living organism and try to apply it doesn't does its own thing which is why um technique looks like evolution where you're basically taking the cells and putting them in different conditions and forcing them to evolve and then analyzing that evolution becomes really powerful but again that's where ai can come in if you do those kind of experiments if you force changes to the genome or to the dna you get a lot of variants you get a lot of information a lot of data so then having having a human go in and analyze all those changes is very difficult so a lot of times that's where things like machine learning come in where they go in and they do an experiment throw the data into the computer and then try to see if patterns emerge that can inform us on how to do rational engineering so we've got two questions from our youtube channel that complement each other really well so i'll do i'll do one and then the second one and kind of we can hear from you on it so mike taran is outright asking what's the chance that this biomaterial mutates in a way that we can't control so kind of talking about the surprise of nature that it was throwing at you and then elan lift also in our youtube channel is asking how have rules and laws of gene modification affected your lab work and also who makes those rules and what's specifically restricted yeah so for the first one um what typically causes a cell to mutate or change is stress um so what we try to do is create materials create proteins that don't stress the cell out and so that becomes um a delicate balance of you know if you try to express your protein too much it's going to take up too much metabolic load of the cell like it'd be like if i told you to just you know grow hair all the time don't do anything else in your body just grow hair and your body is going to kind of go okay no because i need to live and so that's the point where the cell kind of starts going no i don't want to do what you want i'm going to try to change i'm going to try to mutate to prevent what you are asking me to do so in our materials we really try to limit the amount of stress involved and so that is one of the perks of using s-layer proteins because they're on the surface of the cell and because the cell already makes them in high high abundance there are tons of them on the cell um us attaching things extracellular to to that doesn't really cause that much change or stress to the cell the cell doesn't really see a notable difference and in the paper there are um experiments we did to show that the protein is still being produced the same way it was produced naturally and so that is one way to prevent mutation is to just keep the cell as chill as possible and in as natural a state as possible but that isn't always possible sometimes you are creating things that do stress the cell out or that the stress you know the cell doesn't want to do and we'll try to mutate or for some other reason causes mutation and in that case we start getting into a very big field of synthetic biology that's funded um all over the place which is basically the control of these cells in the environment um if they start to mutate if they start to get out of control how do we stop that how do we control it and it gets into a whole big field of um you know non-natural amino acids and oxytrophs and these are things where basically we make the cells dependent on us to live and so if they try to mutate and change and go out and do their own thing we just take away what they need to live and they die and so there's a lot of different um methodologies being developed to prevent mutation and to have as much control as possible because we we don't want a gray goo kind of situation yeah there's definitely there's a lot of regulations in place to to prevent um I mean the public expresses a lot of concern of this right you know we don't want to be changing things in nature and then accidentally letting them out and and destroying the world like it's there's a lot of processes you have to go to like in terms of approval of getting these kind of bio hazards in your lab you know safe to work with and safe for the environment so it's cool to know that that you guys are using those strategies but we have a fantastic question in the chat room about keeping uh the cells that you're working with alive um and uh honey's wall web on twitch actually wants to know um the composite structures that you're making um will they be alive or are you just using the cells to build the structure first with the certain traits and then the cells will die kind of as if like 3d nano printers yeah so um uh all the different labs that work on engineered living materials approach this differently there are a lot of them um especially out of mit they actually use bio printers with cells and they print down the cells and sometimes they they make what they want and then the material dies or sometimes on purpose the material is assembled by the cells and then we kill the cells because we don't want them involved anymore after they create the material but for me i'm actually working on truly living materials i want the cells to survive hopefully forever and just keep um being involved in the the building of the material because that way you know if i build say a nice flat structure and somebody comes in and punches a hole in it well in my material because the cells are living if i provide them with a little bit of food or a little bit of the material that they attach say you know um calcium or a biopolymer which sometimes they can make on their own the cells will then grow into that hole and heal it and so that is in my mind truly engineered living materials they have to have a component of self healing self repair and i want that self repair to be as hands off as possible so in the paper we actually did an experiment where we took the cells we bound nanoparticles to them um nor they bound nanoparticles to themselves and then we left them in solution with almost uh no new food um so they ran out of food eventually and very little air and we just left them on the bench top at room temperature for two weeks actually we've done it for a month but it was published for two weeks and um and we basically saw after that time what happened were they still alive did the nanoparticles hurt them and what we found was that yes they were absolutely still alive nanoparticles were still um encrusting the surface and uh what was even cooler was if we took a little bit of those cells that had been just sitting there for two weeks and we moved them into fresh media fresh um so fresh food um fresh nanoparticles they actually then grew a new material and so we have the ability to basically seed and grow a new organism and a new material from that point on which is kind of the living point and so i kind of think of it how for years we have tried to push nature out of our buildings right we have created these sterile environments and we you know our walls our desks all of our stuff we don't want microbes we try to get rid of them and so now the industry is trying to think okay well how can we reintroduce nature back into our buildings in a helpful and healthy way and one of the ways to do that is to have microbes that are alive and can you know heal things in your environment or detoxify things in your environment how cool would it be if you know your paint had the ability to freshen your air nice um so james johnson in youtube and actually i'm going to bounce through a couple of these uh says that that sounds like it would be good for vascular needs um roger c on youtube is also sort of asking space materials like could we end up using it to build things in space um and then helio pausing is asking the big question that i definitely uh want to ask which is can you grow a burger in a petri dish um so it sounds like there's just like a huge range of applications for this to be applied to yeah for sure so my research lately has been more well i've kind of had to one has been in trying to do bioremediation so using the slayer to then take things out of wastewater that we want or that we don't want so for example you know gadolinium is very um very useful to us and it can be found in water but it's very hard to get out because it's very um rare in the water it's not very much of it so microbes are great for that um but i'm also working on structural materials so you know i want to build actual things with mechanical properties but then uh vasculature that is definitely a field of research people go into i pretty much stay away from the medical field because i don't have to deal with the fda and all of that nightmare um but there are people who are actively trying to build um vasculature and and medical devices that use live cells to either create them or help them grow and and be part of a human being um obviously that's uh that actually is a very exciting and very promising field of research but again whenever you have to do something with people it's going to be a little slow and then space research i love space research i have a little bit of a background getting to play around with um space companies and and basically synthetic biology has huge applications um for both um things like the iss and and and long-term spacecraft but also actually on other planets like mars you can talk about all sorts of applications from you know actually building materials and hopefully those materials will impart extra um abilities beyond a mechanical um man made materials so like i said you could have something that was on the iss that was part of the walls that helped keep the air clean or you could have a bacterial filtration system in the water that detoxifies everything and you know uses all of the waste to then produce something that's useful you know microbes love to grow on our waste and then if you engineer them correctly they could then go and make a pharmaceutical for you or make some other chemical that you need that would be very hard for us to take with us um as long as we can just take the cell line we can then create something from that um so it's a little easier to transport um and then there's also the idea on planetary surfaces of actually using them to to engineer the environment we're in obviously terraforming is way big we're not talking about that but in our small environment you know can they detoxify the mars soil in a way that we can then use it because there's lots of chemicals in there that we do not want to have in there or um a lot of microbes have the ability to take certain minerals out of soil that we do need it's geomicrobiology um you'd be surprised to see how much microbes actually affect and and control um the the rock the soil everything around us and so you know a lot of people can look at ancient rock structures and actually see how the microbes were affecting the um the structure that they're looking at and so how can we do that on another planet that allows us to create a small biosphere that is useful to us because really when it comes down to down to it humans can't live without bacteria we can't live without these things and these things um these little bugs are going to change depending on the environment that we're in so we need to understand and hopefully control that both for our health and also for producing things that we need yeah there there's some fantastic applications that you mentioned there and there's actually a really great question in our chat room that relates to all of that um FIT Orion on twitch wants to ask what type of environments could such a system survive in vacuum or high radiation so with the colobacteria the the species that you've been looking at could you tell us a little bit about what environment it needs right now with your research to grow and whether you think it might be able to survive these extreme or environments of radiational vacuum yeah so the great thing about microbes is that we find them everywhere all sorts of extreme environments so um being able to uh just find the microbe that can survive the environment you need currently synthetic biology focuses very much on what we call model organisms ones that we highly understand know how to engineer and are really great at doing what we want them to do such as E. coli or yeast but a lot of the field is starting to go into harnessing these other bacteria that live in these more extreme environments and can do these really extreme chemistries that we need rather than trying to put them in E. coli a friend of mine actually has a company called micro buyer that basically looks at these extreme microbes and then tries to domesticate them to take them in her lab and figure out how to modify their DNA how to grow them how to control them because that is a huge field research in itself just understanding how to deal with a new microbe as far as cyanobacteria or not cyanobacteria colibacter so they are freshwater bug they live in your ponds and streams probably in your tap water they're kind of everywhere but they like to live in semi warm to cool environments they don't need very much food and that's one of the reasons why they are so great for biomaterials we don't have to feed them very much they're very happy in just pure water in a random room temperature environment they're very friendly to human beings they are not toxic to you at all if you were to accidentally ingest some colibacter it's probably not going to hurt you at all so that's why it's really good for thinking about things like a common wastewater stream on a spacecraft is cyanobacteria colibacter would be really great in that if biomaterials because they don't need much food it's great because you don't have to constantly be replenishing their food they have the ability to just survive for a long time on minimal resources but you know if you are starting to think about more extreme environments or more specific applications then you got to go to other bacteria like I was mentioning cyanobacteria is great because it grows on sunlight so you don't have to feed it as much and it has all these cool abilities to do calcium mineralization and other detoxification things so they're actually being looked at a lot for life support systems but then there are bugs that we have found you know deep deep in the ice and can survive really really super cold environments or you look at different bugs like the all-time favorite is tardy grades you know we have exposed them to vacuum we have exposed them to high radiation and they just kind of survive they are kind of unkillable it's a little disturbing and it's because they have this whole classification state and that's the whole other field of research but the key to applying synthetic biology to extreme environments is finding the bug that already is pretty happy there you know one of the bugs I worked at geobacillus stearothermophilus is a thermophile it actually grows in really really hot temperatures and so if you have a wastewater stream or an environment that you're talking like 60 degrees celsius very very toasty happy as a clam in there in fact that's its favorite home to be in and so you would use that bacteria for that environment rather than trying to force say E. coli to survive an environment that they're not really good at as far as vacuum and space radiation go obviously we don't have access to the microbes that are in that environment but I truly believe that we will find in extreme environments life maybe it's on an asteroid maybe we discovered that on the surface of the ISS some microbes got out there and they've adapted and evolved and now they survive there and now we can use them so I do think as we explore the universe further we will find life that we can harness for our own needs and hopefully make them a part of our world in our chat room we have a question from neuroborg which I think is a very appropriate name for the conversation that we're having so far today they're asking that do you think bioprinted organs for transplant will be created in maybe the next 10 to 20 years so um like I said medical field isn't really my thing I don't know a lot about it but I have heard that they are already growing and bioprinting organs there are companies that are doing that and kind of one of the things to to know about synthetic biology is that when it moves into the company stage when it's an independent you know consumer company it's getting pretty far along in its life cycle and it the whole point is to send it out into the world and have it applied and so there are companies that are starting to do printing of organs especially organs when we're talking about things like skin and surface of vasculature but also bigger organs as far as when these actually get transplanted into humans I have no idea that is totally up to the regulatory bodies and you know all the hugely time consuming requirements that they have where you first put it in mice and then you put it in pigs and you see how long they live and the thing is that you can't just put it in them for a week and see if they survive you got to leave them in there for a while and see what happens over time because a human being is going to hopefully have this you know transplanted organ for the rest of their life what if it's great for 10 years but then in 15 years it you know goes all haywire and we need to to deal with that so I do think that actually transplanting into humans is probably a little further away but it's definitely a mature technology as far as synthetic biology goes yeah all these applications that you're kind of putting out there in terms of synthetic biology you've really sold me on how important this field is but not only how important it is like how regulated it is too so we're not just you know in the lab shooting bullets of things trying to make them work I mean sometimes we are but we're doing it in a way with this goal in mind of trying to benefit all of humanity whether that's through cleaning up the environment or making new materials that could be put into the human body um synthetic biology seems like it's it's something that we need to keep on top of and keep working more towards so um if people wanted to find out more about your research read the paper that you've been mentioning and all of your work what can they go to do that so the paper was published by a journal called ACS synthetic biology so if you just search for my name on there or engineered living materials it should pop up it was published in their January 2019 issue unfortunately this is a somewhat paywall journal so if you are interested in getting a full pdf of it and you don't have access to the journal uh one of the the things that people don't realize is that the authors of a paper are more than able and allowed to send that pdf out to anybody they want to so um if you just tweet me at at mary michael um or email me at mmsharrier at lbl.gov I am happy to send you a copy of the paper um if you want to find out more about engineered living materials in general there are a bunch of really great reviews on that journal as well as some other journals that kind of talk about all the different applications um that you can go for and one of the things you'll notice is that I find very few synthetic biologists that don't have um an environmental and um human benefit mindset you know we use synthetic biology because we think it's going to be better for the planet better for um human beings it's gonna you know replace really really toxic manufacturing such as you know a lot of the company's starting to make spider silks and leather out of mech bacteria or milk and like said burgers actually out of bacteria and these are ways to supplant um industries that are you know using cows which are not great for the environment or are using um a bunch of chemicals to create a plastic you know we're trying to supplant all that so these reviews kind of you'll see a trend in them where they're trying to supplant a negative industry with something that is more sustainable and that's what I find um kind of a core of all synthetic biologists that I meet um and then if you want to find out more about um specifically colobacter and engineered living materials you know just come talk to me um online I can give you more of a background on that um and there's a bunch of other labs that are doing things that are similar at the joshi lab uses curly fibers which are really cool little tendrils that come out of a cell and they're using that to do um similar work of attachment and growth of materials cool well um the both of us just want to thank you so much for coming on the show and and getting us excited about the cool things we can do with science to make our world better and I'm really glad that that it seems like the field and the scientists involved in synthetic biology do have that beneficial mindset of of helping the environment and helping humanity to be better through the knowledge that we gained from that so thank you so much for your time um Jared I think we better thank our patrons yeah we should thank our patrons and of course we want to thank all of you who help make this show possible we also we always start with our escape velocity citizens these folks give us ten dollars or more per episode and they get really cool stuff uh with it we also have our orbital citizens as well these folks give us five dollars or more per episode so find your name on there as best you can if you can find it and then we have our sub orbital citizens who give us two dollars and fifty cents or more per episode and you still get perks even if you're a sub orbital citizen and then even our orbit or our ground support says sorry I stepped up and then went back down our ground support citizens who give us a dollar or more per episode you folks even get some nice little things that we like to give you to say thank you we wouldn't be able to do these shows without you we wouldn't be able to have them here we wouldn't be able to bring in incredible guests to talk 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