Protocellular Materials: A Floating Mold Technique for the Programmed Assembly of Protocells into Protocellular Materials Capable of Non‐Equilibrium Biochemical Sensing (Adv. Mater. 24/2021)

The fabrication of tissue-like materials capable of emergent bioinspired behaviors represents an emerging challenge of bottom-up synthetic biology and biomimetic materials science. In article number 2100340, Pierangelo Gobbo and co-workers report a new technique for the assembly of tissue-like materials from protocell building blocks. The resulting “protocellular materials” are free-standing, robust, and can be chemically programmed to display an emergent non-equilibrium spatiotemporal sensing behavior.