Fabrication of nanocomposites and hybrid materials using microbial biotemplates

Abstract

Microbes are important part of life that vary in sizes and shapes, diverse surface chemistry and biology, and porous nature of their cell walls. Besides their importance in industrial processes such as fermentation, these serve as biotemplates and provide a biomimetic approach for fabrication of multifarious complex constructs with predefined features, ordered composites and hybrid nanomaterials, microdevices, and micro/nanorobots through various strategies. The template or building blocks for such approaches can be bacterial, algal, and fungal cells or virus particles. Here, we have summarized recent advancements in biofabrication based on live microbes. Using engineering approaches and suitable methods, live microbes can be manipulated as functional “micro/nanodevices and -robots” to further perform biological functions such as replication, distribution, motility, formation of colonies, and secretion of metabolites at will. Biofabrication based on microbes provides effective methods to control and manipulate microbes as functional live building blocks to create micro/nanodevices and -robots for biomedical and energy applications.