Glass Microchannel Formation by Mycelium

Abstract

We propose a new method to fabricate complicated 3-dimensional glass microchannels. We employed mycelium for this purpose. Mycelium possesses a complicated, fine and three-dimensional network structure. We cultivated mycelium in silica compounds, and subsequently silica compounds were heated to be sintered. During this heating process, all the mycelium was burned off and remained a fine network channel structure in a transparent glass chip. We also tried to control of the growth of this mycelium. The growth could be changed by growth conditions. In this work, we used cyclic mechanical stimuli for this purpose. We set cyclic tensile strain to the sample under growing mycelium. This cyclic strain caused anisotropic growth of the mycelium in some condition.