sputum

A few weeks later on April Fool’s Day in 2007, Google would announce a new feature called “Gmail Paper” offering users the chance to have Google print out their email archive on “94% post-consumer organic soybean sputum ” and then have it sent to them through the Postal Service.

It also delivered results in less than four hours for urine, pus, and sputum samples, and within one day for blood samples.

In this study, experts engineered a living material resembling natural sputum, or phlegm, from CF patients that can grow 3D polymicrobial biofilms in a controlled manner, resembling those found in the CF lung.

The living material incorporates multiple microbial communities and key nutritional and chemical factors that promote bacterial growth and exhibit physical properties mimicking those of biofilms from CF sputum.

The team were able to achieve this by combining peptides with a culture medium that is known to recreate natural sputum and which can be easily infected.