Like the cement-producing bacteria, this falls under the category of “using microbes to construct the built environment.” Projects like these have no bearing on the natural microbial ecology of structures, but still go to show that the relationship between humans, microbes,and the built environment is complex and can take many forms.
In this work, researchers from MIT use a bacteriophage to control the arrangement of nanotubes on a surface, thereby allowing the production of more efficient solar cells with little additional cost.