Here, we discuss the interactions between hydrogel matrices and engineered living cells, focusing on how hydrogels influence cell behaviours and how cells affect hydrogel properties. Hydrogels, a class of soft, wet, and biocompatible materials, have been widely used as matrices for engineered living cells, leading to the nascent field of engineered living hydrogels. By designing the functionalities of living cells and the structures of non‐living matrices, engineered living materials can be created to detect variability in the surrounding environment and to adjust their functions accordingly, thereby enabling applications in health monitoring, disease treatment, and environmental remediation. Inspired by living biological systems, engineered living cells and non‐living matrices are brought together, which gives rise to the technology of engineered living materials. Living biological systems, ranging from single cells to whole organisms, can sense, process information, and actuate in response to changing environmental conditions. We believe that 3D bioprinting will become an important development direction and provide more contributions to this field. In this review, we summarize the progress in the field, cell type and material selection, and the latest applications of 3D bioprinting to manufacture ELMs, as well as their advantages and limitations, hoping to deepen our understanding and provide new insights into ELM design. Among the many ELM design and manufacturing methods, three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting stands out for its precise control over the structure of the fabricated constructs and the spatial distribution of cells. ELMs are multi-scale bulk materials that combine the properties of self-healing and organism adaptability with the designed physicochemical or mechanical properties for functional applications in various fields, including therapy, electronics, and architecture. The design of engineered living materials (ELMs) is an emerging field developed from synthetic biology and materials science principles. In the future, the combination of synthetic biology and techniques from other disciplines will lead to practical large-scale applications of biofilms. In addition, the improvement of 3D printing to use bioinks has also achieved significant progresses in fabricating living functional biofilms with specific structures. The mechanical properties of biofilms can be tuned through genetic editing, metal ion curing and synthetic gene circuits, etc. Functional biofilms for diverse applications, including catalysis, electric conduction, bioremediation, and medical therapy have been demonstrated in the literature. With the integration of signaling pathways, engineering of metabolic pathways and modification of extracellular polymeric substances, living functional biofilms have been constructed by researchers through various strategies. In this review, we further comment on the design strategies for multiple innovative applications of living functional biofilms. Traditional applications of biofilms, such as environmental remediation, bioleaching, microbial fuel cells, and corrosion protection, are often built on the basis of wild-type or metabolically engineered strains. However, biofilms possess favorable traits such as self-regeneration, sustainability, scalability, and tunability, which make them candidates for diverse applications. Historically, biofilms have been perceived as problematic or detrimental.
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