Additive manufacturing methods (e.g. direct-write, stereolithography (SLA), etc.) will be used to place living organisms (e.g. bacteria, diatoms, etc.) at desired locations for use as templates for nanoscale geometric and material property control. Current efforts to additively manufacture hierarchical structures focus on commercially available machines and are limited by the resolution of those machines, while work on bio-inspired materials consists using organisms to create the printing materials. Bioprinting efforts look into using additive manufacturing to place organisms or cell in desired locations to create new biological systems, but no efforts to date have utilized bioprinting to yield synthetic materials.
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