Microbial production inside microfabricated hydrogel microtubes

Biomass production by microbes is promising, where scale-up, competition against other microbes, and collection of the products are the major challenges. Here, we propose to use microtubes to encapsulate, protect, and culture microbes. Tubes can be micro- and mass-fabricated and prevent competitive microbes from intruding inside. The byproducts can be collected together with the tubes. In this paper, we demonstrate the proof-of-concepts experiments: we fabricated hydrogel microtube and cultured lactic acid producing microbes inside. The microbes increased and produced lactic acid, which was later successfully collected with the microtubes. This concept can be readily further expanded to biomass microbial production.