Multi-agent reasoning enables predictive design of living materials

preprint OA: closed CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to accelerate scientific discovery, but most successful frameworks operate within well-defined molecular, protein or materials spaces. Living materials present a more formidable computational problem because functions emerge from context dependent coupling among cells, matrices, fabrication processes and evaluation conditions. Here we introduce LiveMat, a multi-agent reasoning framework that transforms unstructured literature into a computable design space for living materials. LiveMat standardizes 34,215 living material records, integrating 16,769 microorganism and 17,446 polymer entries into a knowledge graph linking living components, abiotic matrices, functional outputs, evaluation contexts and performance metrics. Benchmarking across five large language models shows that living material reasoning is limited mainly by cross-domain feature integration rather than coarse classification. LiveMat overcomes this limitation through constraint decomposition, provenance-aware extraction, consistency checking and expert-anchored ranking. In a prospective wound-healing task, it prioritizes a four-component design with state-of-the-art in vivo performance, establishing a scalable infrastructure for interpretable, evidence-grounded living material discovery.
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Abstract Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to accelerate scientific discovery, but most successful frameworks operate within well-defined molecular, protein or materials spaces. Living materials present a more formidable computational problem because functions emerge from context dependent coupling among cells, matrices, fabrication processes and evaluation conditions. Here we introduce LiveMat, a multi-agent reasoning framework that transforms unstructured literature into a computable design space for living materials. LiveMat standardizes 34,215 living material records, integrating 16,769 microorganism and 17,446 polymer entries into a knowledge graph linking living components, abiotic matrices, functional outputs, evaluation contexts and performance metrics. Benchmarking across five large language models shows that living material reasoning is limited mainly by cross-domain feature integration rather than coarse classification. LiveMat overcomes this limitation through constraint decomposition, provenance-aware extraction, consistency checking and expert-anchored ranking. In a prospective wound-healing task, it prioritizes a four-component design with state-of-the-art in vivo performance, establishing a scalable infrastructure for interpretable, evidence-grounded living material discovery. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes Figure 1-5 revised;Figure 6 has been added;The textual descriptions throughout the manuscript have been revised;The methodological details have been supplemented;The references have been updated accordingly.

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europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00
unpaywall
last seen: 2026-05-29T02:00:03.542394+00:00
License: CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0