Engineering Living Wood Materials and Wood Waste by Tailorable Wood-Microorganisms Interactions

Goal
To meet the challenges of the ongoing global climate crisis, solutions are needed to efficiently sequester CO2. One exciting possibility is to store it as wood in buildings. This project aims to search for methods and techniques that would allow, with the help of microorganisms, to turn wood, and especially wood waste, into materials with properties comparable or even superior to those of conventional ones. Most often, the interaction of microorganisms with wood inevitably leads to the decomposition of the latter. In this project, however, we want to harness the possibilities offered by selected strains of bacteria and fungi, such as biomineralization and mycelium formation, to transform wood waste into sustainable building materials and explore the making of engineered living wood materials (ELWM) (ELM).