Scientists have recently created a series of “living materials” made from… kombucha! The ingredients of the popular tea drink were introduced with a mobile culture of yeast and bacteria to create the products.
The “mother of Kombucha”, as the fungus is sometimes called can do much more than just be used in beverages, scientists have discovered.
Researchers on engineered living materials (ELMs) have succeeded in changing the content of the culture. Such materials can be used for a number of purposes in the future – including light sensing, and detecting contaminants.
And scientists say that these products can be easily made at home, in a person’s kitchen.
The work is based on the 2014 MIT project where researchers invented “Escherichia coli” cells to create biomarkers containing non-living components.
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But the new products had no practical reasons in that case, unlike this new project with kombucha flavor. Scientists wanted to achieve this at a much larger scale, which is why they included kombucha, or rather its parental culture into the experiment.
How did they create ELMs? The researchers took a strain of laboratory yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and combined it with the bacterium Komagataeibacter rhaeticus. This was not easy for them to get the ratio right. But they eventually discovered it and came up with the engineered culture, called Syn-SCOBY.
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The bacteria can perform a number of functions, such as sensitizing chemicals in pollutants, or creating proteins capable of shining in the presence of blue light, among many, as reported by ScienceAlert. The study was published in Nature Materials.