Based on our extensive expertise on Dielectrophoresis (DEP), we are introducing a new paradigm in bionanomanufacturing by using microbial factories as printing heads, as in nano 3D printing using bacteria. This is revolutionary because we will be using biology as a tool to manufacture nanopatterns of useful and renewable materials with a resolution, <100 nm, that is challenging to achieve using traditional top-down nanofabrication technologies that mostly use non-renewable materials. The spatiotemporal manipulation of the microbial factory is achieved using the DEP phenomenon, either with electrode arrays or using light-induced DEP (LIDEP). The facts that the microbial printing heads can be grown by the million, and that DEP enables parallel manipulation of many cells support the scalability of the platform. The long-term vision is a nanoweaving platform that grows a part with designed structure across multiple length scales.

More details about this work were mentioned in a recent featured article