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Multi-agent reasoning enables predictive design of living materials

Xiao, Y.; Zeng, X.; Yang, Z.; Gu, J.; Wang, Y.; Wen, H.; Chen, M.; Lu, Y.; Huang, Z.; Hu, J.; Liu, J.; Sha, C.; Xie, J.; Li, H.; Zhu, X.; Zheng, S.; Zong, W.; Xu, Y.; Li, F.; Yu, Z.

2026-02-16 biochemistry
10.64898/2026.02.15.705954 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Living materials derive function from tightly coupled cellular and material processes to deliver adaptive and therapeutic capabilities, yet their predictive design remains constrained by fragmented, cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience-driven iteration. Here we introduce LiveMat, a multi-agent reasoning framework that reconstructs living materials as a computable design space from unstructured literature. LiveMat curates and standardizes 34,738 living-material records, integrating 16,086 microorganism entries and 18,682 polymer entries into a domain-scale knowledge graph comprising tens of thousands of entities and relationships. Through constraint-driven multi-agent reasoning and expert-anchored evaluation, the system converts implicit design heuristics into explicit, auditable rules. Comparative benchmarking across leading large language models shows that limitations in living materials reasoning arise primarily from cross-domain feature integration rather than coarse-grained classification. In a prospective acute wound-healing task, LiveMat evaluates combinatorial four-component systems across six functional dimensions and identifies a top-ranked design whose in vivo performance matches state-of-the-art systems. LiveMat establishes a scalable reasoning infrastructure for cumulative, data-grounded living materials discovery.

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