The FUNGATERIA project focuses on bringing mycelium-based materials into an ‘Engineered Living Material' (ELM) context. ELMs comprise living cells that remain biologically active in use-cases, thereby offering radically new and tailored functionalities over non-living materials, for example: self-regeneration, adaptation to environmental cues and self-organisation across hierachies of scale and structure. In this project, we target three primary objectives:
1. to develop a portfolio of ELMs using a co-cultivation process employing mycelium and bacteria.
2. to develop a modular and generic ELM manufacturing platform.
3. to probe the emerging ethical, social and environmental issues for ELM technologies.
The emerging field of ELMs is still in its infancy, but it promises radical and disruptive alternatives to our current methods of material production, fitting within a broader paradigm shift towards biofabrication which promises to become a dominant mode of manufacturing in the 21st Century.
This project will address an existing development gap in the field by developing a portfolio of mycelium-based ELMs composed from a co-cultivation process utilising fungi and a bacterial strain.
We hypothesise that adaptive growth of mycelium can be exploited to develop an autonomous bottom-up manufacturing technology, with properties such as strength, density and growth rate being locally informed by interactions with bacteria and the environment. We also aim to implement functions targeting ecological priorities such as the break-down of environmental pollutants and atmospheric carbon sequestration.
In this project, the concept of mycelium-based ELMs further includes the genetic engineering of the bacterial partner, providing a further dimension of control towards the production of ELM’s with predictable functionalities, shapes and other properties.
In the long term, the results of this project promise to contribute to transformations across all sectors by providing living materials that can regenerate, self-heal, and respond to environmental stimuli in a resource conscious way.
This project sets out the ambitious target of holistically considering ELM design, modelling, production and lifecycle. From a materials perspective, the project seeks to establish the insights and technologies to demonstrate:
The FUNGATERIA project focuses on bringing mycelium-based materials into an ‘Engineered Living Material' (ELM) context. ELMs comprise living cells that remain biologically active in use-cases and offer radically new and tailored functionalities over non-living materials, for example: self-regeneration, adaptation to environmental cues and self-organisation across hierachies of scale and structure.
In this project we target three primary objectives:
1. To develop a portfolio of ELMs using a co-cultivation process employing mycelium and bacteria.
2. To develop a modular and generic ELM manufacturing platform.
3. To probe the emerging ethical, social and environmental issues for ELM technologies.
The emerging field of ELMs is still in its infancy, but it promises radical and disruptive alternatives to our current methods of material production, fitting within a broader paradigm shift towards biofabrication which promises to become a dominant mode of manufacturing in the 21st Century.
This project will address an existing development gap in the field by developing a portfolio of mycelium-based ELMs composed from a co-cultivation process utilising fungi and a bacterial strain.
We hypothesise that adaptive growth of mycelium can be exploited to develop an autonomous bottom-up manufacturing technology, with properties such as strength, density and growth rate being locally informed by interactions with bacteria and the environment. We also aim to implement functions targeting ecological priorities such as the break-down of environmental pollutants and atmospheric carbon sequestration.
In this project, the concept of mycelium-based ELMs further includes the genetic engineering of the bacterial partner, providing a further dimension of control towards the production of ELM’s with predictable functionalities, shapes and other properties.
In the long term, the results of this project promise to contribute to transformations across all sectors by providing living materials that can regenerate, self-heal, and respond to environmental stimuli in a resource conscious way.
This project sets out the ambitious target of holistically considering ELM design, modelling, production and lifecycle. From a materials perspective, the project seeks to establish the insights and technologies to demonstrate:
Fungateria –– enlisting synthetic fungal-bacterial consortia to produce multicellular mycelium-based ELMs with computational capability
FUNGATERIA has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-EIC-2021-PATHFINDER CHALLENGES programme under grant agreement No. 101071145. It is co-funded by the UKRI
Fungateria –– enlisting synthetic fungal-bacterial consortia to produce multicellular mycelium-based ELMs with computational capability
FUNGATERIA has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-EIC-2021-PATHFINDER CHALLENGES programme under grant agreement No. 101071145. It is co-funded by the UKRI