Pattern 2.1: Co-culturing Self-pigmenting Bacterial Cellulose

Abstract

With rising awareness of environmental costs in manufacturing, the textile and fashion industries are gradually adopting bio-based materials and biofabrication as emerging alternatives (Biofabricate and Fashion for Good 2020; Vuruşkan and Özbengi Uslu 2025; Burnstine and Camargo 2025). Among a great range of living materials, bacterial cellulose provides significant plasticity and scalability (Guan et al. 2022). Recent studies in engineered living materials indicates that pigment biosynthesis can possibly be integrated into cellulose formation, creating self-pigmenting systems (Gilbert et al. 2021). Yet, designoriented knowledge about how these systems generate specific pigment distributions and spatial patterns remains incomplete, especially regarding controllable patterning capabilities.

In response, this research focuses on building a systematic pigment- and patternoriented understanding of coculture selforganisation. It investigates how pigmentproducing and celluloseproducing microbes can coproduce diverse and aesthetically visible patterns, and how these biological tendencies can be harnessed as a design tool. The objective is to develop a coculture design framework and corresponding fabrication methods that employ engineered E scherichia coli and Komagataeibacter xylinus , extending recent advances in bacterial cellulose biofabrication (Gilmour et al. 2023). Addressing the lack of transferable coculture design methods in existing living materials research, this research treats selfpigmenting bacterial cellulose as a duospecies design system, and organises parameters such as strain combinations, inducer and cofactor regimes, and vessel geometries into an adaptive toolkit.

This research via experiment probes how microbial tendencies—such as edge accumulation, layer thickening, or gradient following—can be mapped onto pigment distribution and emerging pattern types, by systematically varying chemical inputs and spatial arrangements. Thus, co-culture is positioned as a responsive material medium in which pigment expression and cellulose assembly are mutually conditioned. Instead of seeking absolute control of microbial behavior, it explores how reproducible interactions between microbial growth tendencies and design parameters, informing the framework for coordinating pigmentation, cellulose formation, and material performance, while extending discussions in bacterialcellulose and biosynthetic materials research (Gilmour et al. 2023; Guan et al. 2022; Galdino Jr. et al. 2021).