Originally published on February 25, 2021 10:23 am From bridges to skyscrapers, concrete is ubiquitous in modern, human-built environments. It’s durable and cheap but also a big contributor to climate change, and some of the materials used to make it are getting scarcer. Researchers at Montana State University are trying to develop a sustainable alternative with microorganisms. At MSU’s Center for Biofilm Engineering, Assistant Research Professor Erika Espinosa-Ortiz walks over to an incubator filled with glass chemistry flasks. “So all of our fungi and bacteria are growing here,” Espinosa-Ortiz says as she pulls out one of the flasks. Suspended in the liquid is a piece of metal with something growing on it.