Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have managed to make bacterial cells produce biofilms that can act as "living materials."

According to a press release, the researchers can use the manmade living materials to conduct light or generate energy. Like live cells, the living materials are environmentally responsive, but also have all the traits of nonliving particles.

"Our idea is to put the living and the nonliving worlds together to make hybrid materials that have living cells in them and are functional," study senior author Timothy Lu, an MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, said in the release. "It's an interesting way of thinking about materials synthesis, which is very different from what people do now, which is usually a top-down approach."

The team's paper was published Sunday in the journal Nature Materials. Lu said the practical, everyday uses for the research would be self-healing materials, solar cells, diagnostic sensors and more.

The researchers used mostly the E. coli bacteria for its naturally produced curli fibers biofilm. Curli fibers are amyloid proteins that stick E. coli to various surfaces and they are useful for the project because they help retain nonliving particles.

The research team also demonstrated how the cells even appeared to talk to one another. The team designed living materials that could coordinate the stimulation of each cell to control the composition of the biofilms.

"It's a really simple system but what happens over time is you get curli that's increasingly labeled by gold particles. It shows that indeed you can make cells that talk to each other and they can change the composition of the material over time," said Lu. "Ultimately, we hope to emulate how natural systems, like bone, form. No one tells bone what to do, but it generates a material in response to environmental signals."