Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF)

Living Electronics for Environmental Monitoring

Through a new collaboration across materials engineering, autonomous low-power wireless electronic engineering, and microbial ecology, this initiative will develop a new kind of untethered "living sensor" network that uses microbial communities to monitor air and water quality and detect environmental threats. The project will create centimeter-scale engineered living electronic sensors that can detect environmental threats such as nutrient pollution, harmful algal blooms, biological agents, and the broader impacts of climate and land-use change.

The proposed technology is based on engineered living materials: hydrogel-based structures containing living photosynthetic microorganisms, such as algae or cyanobacteria, combined with autonomous electronics for sensing, computation, energy harvesting, and wireless data transmission. The project is motivated by the need for high-resolution environmental data and will initially focus on the effects of non-point source nutrient pollution on freshwater resource quality, primarily through the harmful algal blooms it stimulates, which poison lake water used as drinking water, a recreation resource, and a habitat that sustains fisheries.

The team will pursue three main objectives:

• optimizing engineered living material architectures that support the growth of multiple algal species
• developing autonomous electronics capable of collecting biological data and transmitting it wirelessly
• deploying and testing the sensors in real freshwater environments in Southeast Michigan

Expected outcomes include 3D-bioprinted multi-algal prototypes, fluorescent sensor mote prototypes, demonstrations of multi-algal sensing, and field deployment data showing sensor integrity and cell viability, establishing a foundation for larger externally funded research. The observed social interactions amongst microbial species will integrate hard-to-measure environmental signals into data outputs useful for ecosystem management and policymaking.