Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155, United States.
Materials Science and Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310024, China.
ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2022 Jul 20;14(28):32289-32298. doi: 10.1021/acsami.2c05639. Epub 2022 Jul 6.
Exoelectrogens are known to be specialized in reducing various extracellular electron acceptors to form conductive nanomaterials that are integrated with their cell bodies both structurally and functionally. Utilizing this unique capacity, we created a strategy toward the design and fabrication of a biohybrid electronic material by exploiting bioreduced graphene oxide (B-rGO) as the structural and functional linker to facilitate the interaction between the exoelectrogen community and external electronics. The metabolic functions of exoelectrogens encoded in this living hybrid can therefore be effectively translated toward corresponding microbial fuel cell applications. Furthermore, this material can serve as a fundamental building block to be integrated with other microorganisms for constructing various electronic components. Toward a broad impact of this biohybridization strategy, photosynthetic organelles and cells were explored to replace exoelectrogens as the active bioreducing components and as formed materials exhibited 4- and 8-fold improvements in photocurrent intensities as compared with native bioelectrode interfaces. Overall, a biologically driven strategy for the fabrication and assembly of electronic materials is demonstrated, which provides a unique opportunity to precisely probe and modulate desired biofunctions through deterministic electronic inputs/outputs and revolutionize the design and manufacturing of next-generation (bio)electronics.
已知异化电子菌专门将各种细胞外电子受体还原，形成与它们的细胞体在结构和功能上都整合在一起的导电纳米材料。利用这种独特的能力，我们通过利用生物还原氧化石墨烯 (B-rGO) 作为结构和功能连接体，设计并制造了一种生物混合电子材料的策略，以促进异化电子菌群落与外部电子之间的相互作用。因此，这种活的混合体中编码的异化电子菌的代谢功能可以有效地转化为相应的微生物燃料电池应用。此外，这种材料可以作为一个基本构建块，与其他微生物集成，用于构建各种电子元件。为了广泛影响这种生物杂交策略，探索了光合细胞器和细胞作为活性生物还原成分来替代异化电子菌，与天然生物电极界面相比，所形成的材料的光电流强度提高了 4 倍和 8 倍。总的来说，展示了一种用于电子材料制造和组装的生物驱动策略，为通过确定性电子输入/输出精确探测和调节所需的生物功能提供了独特的机会，并彻底改变了下一代（生物）电子学的设计和制造。
