自然界中微生物种类极为丰富,尺寸涵盖了纳米级与微米级。微生物细胞培养成本低廉,生长繁殖迅速,具有丰富的遗传表现型,因此微生物是可用于纳米、微米以及多层次跨尺度加工的天然“基本单元”和“底盘细胞”。“基于微生物”的生物制造目的是利用微生物的特异结构和多样功能进行仿生和调控,操纵微生物进行加工组装,从而获得新材料、新器件。同时,建立深入研究微生物行为模式的新技术与新方法,为揭示传统方法所未涉及的基本科学问题提供新的平台。以下将分别从纳米和微米两个尺度以及利用微生物的结构或功能两个角度来概述基于微生物的微纳米生物制造的前沿进展。
Microbe is extremely abundant in nature, and its size has a very wide coverage from nano- to micro-scale making it suitable to be processed at multi-scale level as natural "building blocks" and "chassis cells". Biofabrication based on microbes is an artificial manipulation on microbes to assemble functional materials and devices by using the specificstructures and various biological functions of microbes. In the meantime, the novel strategies of biofarication enables us to study the behavioral details of microbes, which will provide new platforms for uncovering the unsolved basic scientific problems of microbes. In this paper, we reviewed the frontier and progress in biofabrication from nano- and micro-scale in microbes that were manipulated as structured "building blocks" or functional "micro/nano robots".