Researchers design a multifunctional soil-inspired chemical system

Soil is a dynamic system of microbe-material interactions and environmental reactivity. The soil-microbe complex is an integrated and adaptable system that can reshape its state depending on the external environment.

Inspired by these soil characteristics, the researchers designed a chemical system in which sensing and modification can be induced by external stimuli. Professor Gao Xiang of the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is the co-first author of this study.

This study was published in natural chemistry October 24.

The environment colonized by soil microbes is a perfect example of microbe-material interaction in nature. On the one hand, endogenous soil minerals and soil organic matter dynamically interact with exogenous factors such as moisture and mechanical force to guide soil microbial communities. On the other hand, soil microbes regulate biogeochemical cycles to enrich the soil with nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur.

The research team proposed a bottom-up synthetic approach to construct a chemical system composed of nanostructured minerals, starch granules, and liquid metals to loosely represent immobilized inorganic and organic materials and mobile phases in soil.

“The system is chemically, optically and mechanically reactive with programmable properties,” said Professor Lin Yiliang, correspondent and first author of this study and currently an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. “We can ‘encode’ conductive information into materials with mechanical pressure or a laser pattern and then ‘erase’ the conductivity with chemical vapors. The whole process is reversible.”

Besides the structural similarity with real soil and its dynamic reactivity, the soil-inspired chemical system not only enhances microbial metabolism in vitro, but also enriches gut bacterial diversity under pathological conditions and modulates bacterial dysbiosis in vivo.

In in vivo experiments, the soil-inspired chemical system enhanced gut microbiota abundance and modulated dysregulated gut microbes under pathological conditions. “Soil-inspired chemical systems have shown promise for the treatment of gastrointestinal disorders,” said Professor Gao Xiang of SIAT, co-first author of the study.

In addition to being used on gut microbiota, this chemical system can be used to study other microbial systems, such as skin and soil microbiota, which may have implications for human health and the stability and productivity of agro-ecosystems.