PhD student and 2017 J-WAFS graduate fellow Tzu-Chieh Tang designs living materials to solve environmental challenges, with an emphasis on safety and scalability. A MISTI Seed Grant and a summer at Imperial College London grew into a cross-Atlantic effort to develop living membranes with microbes, in a process inspired by the fermented beverage kombucha. Working from the kombucha principle, they developed Syn-SCOBY: a sturdy, cellulose-based biofilm created by and encapsulating a co-culture of engineered microbes. One version of the Syn-SCOBY contained yeast that could detect and degrade the environmental pollutant β-estradiol, but the team emphasized that the modularity of the system meant that it could be customized to target a wide variety of applications.
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