Cultivating Future Materials: Artificial Symbiosis for Bulk Production of Bacterial Cellulose Composites

Symbiotic relationships between micro-organisms are the basis of all global ecosystems. Here we extrapolate this concept for novel material fabrication by creating artificial symbiotic relationships between species that are usually not grown synergistically in nature. Specifically, we combine the cellulose-producing bacterium Komagataeibacter hansenii and the green microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to obtain bulk growth of bacterial cellulose. Usually, bacterial cellulose is produced as floating pellicles at the air-liquid interface of the growing media, because free oxygen, together with the nutrients in the culture medium, is required for the bacteria to synthesise the cellulose fibres. In the co-culture, bacterial cellulose production can be achieved in bulk beyond the restriction of the liquid/air interface as the motile microalgae act as oxygen-generating sites within the culture medium. In exchange, the highly porous and mechanically robust scaffold provided by the cellulose allows the algal community to form a healthy biofilm, which can reach several centimetres thick. We demonstrate that our growing platform allows the simultaneous production of bulk bacterial cellulose in static incubation conditions, taking up an arbitrary and yet tunable 3D shape, dependent on the geometry of the culture vessel and with a relatively high biomass output.