Our latest paper “Engineering bacterial biomanufacturing: characterization and manipulation of Sphingomonas sp. LM7 extracellular polymers” is now published in RSC Soft Matter. This study was spearheaded by Ellen van Wijngaarden in collaboration with Prof. David Hershey’s lab at Wisconsin-Madison. We identified the material properties of a novel polysaccharide, Promonan, and demonstrated improved thermal stability and material stiffness compared with similar bacterial polysaccharides currently used in industry. Our study also explored changing the material composition through alternative processing methods to reduce production time by over 50% and tune the material stiffness for possible applications in bioprinting, bioremediation, and healthcare.