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Our group’s first biohybrid research paper presents a dual biohybrid inspired by anoxygenic photosynthesis. Extracellular conjugated polymer nanoparticles harvest light, while intracellular biomineralized CdS nanoparticles provide reaction-center-like modules in E. coli. This modular design links light capture to intracellular redox chemistry and enhances malate production by nearly 30-fold relative to unmodified cells, offering a design strategy for light-assisted microbial chemical production.

This study develops strain-programmable liquid metal composite fibers that turn deformation-induced interference into a tunable design feature. The fibers support programmable strain-resistance behaviors, bidirectional sensing, strain-invariant circuits, energy harvesting, wireless communication, and thermal management for robust electronic textiles.

This study rewires energy flow in semiconductor biohybrids to improve solar-driven microbial biomanufacturing and waste-to-value conversion.

We report a wrinkled configuration for MOF thin films. The deformable structures confer enhanced strain tolerance, and the wrinkles provide additional exposed surfaces compared with that of planar configurations. Unlike common methods to produce wrinkled structures in other inorganic materials, we developed a synthesis protocol that uses diffusion-driven instability to generate wrinkled MOF thin films that could be utilized for gas seperation and electronics with flexible MOF films.

This study demonstrates that a dynamic hydrogel composite can release cellular-size granules in the physiological environments for regenerative medicine and bioelectronics, which has been long sought in the development of hydrogel-based artificial cells21. A monolithic-to-focal evolving process allows the composite to harness the properties and functions of both monolithic and focal biointerfaces. The hydrogel composites use gelatin and chitosan as the hydrogel matrix to respond to biological environments while also facilitating macroscopic material shaping and manipulation.

We designed a soil-inspired chemical system that consists of nanostructured minerals, starch granules and liquid metals. The soil-inspired material possesses chemical, optical and mechanical responsiveness to yield write–erase functions in electrical performance. The composite can also modulate bacterial growth both in vitro and in vivo, such as enriches gut bacteria diversity, rectifies tetracycline-induced gut microbiome dysbiosis and ameliorates dextran sulfate sodium-induced rodent colitis symptoms within rodent models.

In this work, we show that the periplasm, an underappreciated subcellular region in materials research, can offer a nongenetic pathway for biomineralization of metastable semiconductor nanoclusters. Under light stimulation, the metastable semiconductor nanoclusters could couple with the electron transport chain to increase ATP levels and enhance malate production in the living hybrids. Using the E. coli strain as a model, the current system to develop periplasmic biointerface for enhanced solar-to-chemical production might be extended to other bacterial cells to potentially endow additional sustainability level to the bioremediation applications

We developed a cost-competitive and environmentally friendly approach that is promising for sustainable and scalable production of semiconductor biohybrids towards solar-driven chemical production utilizing multiple pollutants in wastewater. Compared with fossil-fuels refining and sugar-based bacterial fermentation, the wastewater-derived biohybrid system shows lower carbon emission and production cost. We believe wastewater-based hybrid fermentation will provide an alternative for both sustainable biomanufacturing and environmental remediation.

In this work, we showed that a porosity-based heterojunction, a largely overlooked system in materials science, can yield an efficient photoelectrochemical response from the semiconductor surface.

In this work, we identified several soft- hard composite designs in naturally occurring systems, and we use these designs to categorize the existing bioelectric interfaces and to suggest future opportunities in bioelectric studies.