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The demand for petroleum dependent chemicals and materials has been increasing despite the dwindling of their fossil resources. As the dead-end of petroleum based industry has started to appear, today's modern society has to implement…
Active materials capable of autonomously modulating their mechanical properties are foundational to the development of next-generation soft technologies. Here, we introduce a novel class of extensible biohybrid hydrogels powered by living…
The dynamics of cellular aggregates is driven by the interplay of mechanochemical processes and cellular activity. Although deterministic models may capture mechanical features, local chemical fluctuations trigger random cell responses,…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
The true slime mold \textit{Physarum polycephalum} has the remarkable capability to perform self-organized activities such as network formation among food sources. Despite well reproducing the emergence of slime networks, existing models…
Structural cellular materials in nature, such as wood, trabecular bone, corals, and dentin combine complex biological functions with structural roles, such as skeletal support and impact protection1,2. They feature complex structural…
The methodologies of bioinspiration, biomimetics, and bioreplication are inevitably pointing to the incorporation of multifunctionality in engineered materials when designing ever more complex systems. Optimal multifunctionality is also the…
Network formation of associative semiflexible fibers and mixtures of fibers and colloidal particles is simulated for the Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) model of elastic contacts, and a phase diagram in terms of particle elasticity and…
Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest thanks to their bio-mechanical compatibility. An important feature of such deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable…
The occurrence of coiled or helical morphologies is common in nature, from plant roots to DNA packaging into viral capsids, as well as in applications such as oil drilling processes. In many examples, chiral structures result from the…
We study the clustering of a model cyanobacterium \textit{Synechocystis} into microcolonies. The bacteria are allowed to diffuse onto surfaces of different hardness, and interact with the others by aggregation and detachment. We find that…
Soil is a complex, dynamic material, with physical properties that depend on its biological content. We propose a cellular automaton model for self-organizing soil structure, where soil aggregates and serves as food for microbial species.…
Membrane pores are implicated in several critical functions, including cell fusion and the transport of signaling molecules for intercellular communication. However, these structural features are often difficult to probe directly. Droplet…
Bacterial cellulose biofilms are complex networks of strong interwoven nanofibers that control transport and protect bacterial colonies in the film. Design of diverse applications of bacterial cellulose films also relies on understanding…
Biomimetic scale-covered substrates are architected meta-structures exhibiting fascinating emergent nonlinearities via the geometry of collective scales contacts. In spite of much progress in understanding their elastic nonlinearity, their…
A remarkable property of nastic, shape changing plants is their complete fusion between actuators and structure. This is achieved by combining a large number of cells whose geometry, internal pressures and material properties are optimized…
Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…
A fibrous herringbone-modified helicoidal architecture is identified within the exocuticle of an impact-resistant crustacean appendage. This previously unreported composite microstructure, which features highly textured apatite mineral…
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…
Microorganisms can create engineered materials with exquisite structures and living functionalities. Although synthetic biology tools to genetically manipulate microorganisms continue to expand, the bottom-up rational design of engineered…