Congrats to Avinash Manjula-Basavanna and Anna Duraj-Thatte on their new paper, now published at Advanced Functional Materials. The paper describes a new ways to fabricate rigid, transparent materials by drying whole microbial biomass. Avinash and Anna show that this procedure can be accomplished with various microbes (E. coli, bakers yeast, yogurt bacteria), and in some cases yields materials that still contain living cells inside. You can then break off a piece of the material and grow a new one using the same procedure! It was surprising to us that soft and heterogeneous cellulose components would yield something that was so cohesive, uniform, and rigid. We hope that this can lead to new approaches to microbial materials manufacturing.