What if the next generation of high-performance materials did not come from a factory filled with petroleum-based plastics, but from living bacteria?
Scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston have developed a new way to turn bacterial cellulose into an ultra-strong, multifunctional material that could eventually replace plastics in products ranging from packaging to electronics. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, describe a scalable manufacturing process that guides bacteria to build highly organized cellulose structures with remarkable strength and thermal performance.
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