The civil research community has been attracted to self-healing bacterial-based concrete as a potential solution in the economy 4.0 era. This concept provides more sustainable material with a longer lifetime due to the reduction of crack appearance and the need for anthropogenic impact. Regardless of the achievements in this field, the gap in the understanding of the importance of the bacterial role in self-healing concrete remains. Therefore, understanding the bacterial life cycle in the self-healing effect of cement-based materials and selecting the most important relationship between bacterial contribution, self-healing effect, and material characteristics through the process of microbiologically (bacterially) induced carbonate precipitation is just the initial phase for potential applications in real environmental conditions. The concept of this study offers the possibility to recognize the importance of the bacterial life cycle in terms of application in extreme conditions of cement-based materials and maintaining bacterial roles during the self-healing effect.

Kombucha is a fermented tea beverage, which is traditionally prepared by fermenting sweetened black tea with tea fungus, which is a consortium of yeasts and acetic acid bacteria. In this paper, viability of selected wild strains of lactobacilli during Kombucha fermentation, their interaction with...

Reinforced concrete crack repair and maintenance costs are around 84% to 125% higher than construction costs, which emphasises the need to increase the infrastructure service life. Prolongation of the designed service life of concrete structures can have significant economic and ecological benefits by minimising the maintenance actions and related increase of carbon and energy expenditure, making it more sustainable. Different mechanisms such as diffusion, permeation and capillary action are responsible for the transport of fluids inside the concrete, which can impact on the structure service life. This paper presents data on microbially induced repair and self-healing solutions for cementitious materials available in the contemporary literature and compares results of compressive strength test and capillary water absorption test, which are relevant to their sealing and mechanical characteristics. The results of the repair and self-healing solutions (relative to unassisted recovery processes) were “normalized.” Externally applied bacteria-based solutions can improve the compressive strength of cementitious materials from 13% to 27%. The internal solution based solely on bacterial suspension had 19% improvement efficacy. Results also show that “hybrid” solutions, based on both bio-based and non-bio-based components, whether externally or internally applied, have the potential for best repair results, synergistically combining their benefits.

The integration of bacterial biotechnology into construction and geotechnical practices is redefining approaches to material sustainability, infrastructure longevity, and environmental resilience. Over the past two decades, research activity in construction biotechnology has expanded rapidly, with more than 350 publications between 2000 and 2024 and a five-fold increase in annual output since 2020. Beyond bibliometric growth, technical studies have demonstrated the remarkable performance of bacterial systems: for example, microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP) can increase the compressive strength of treated soils by 60–70% and reduce permeability by more than 90% in field-scale trials. In concrete applications, bacterial self-healing has been shown to seal cracks up to 0.8 mm wide and improve water tightness by 70–90%. Similarly, biofilm-mediated corrosion barriers can extend the durability of reinforced steel by significantly reducing chloride ingress, while bacterial biopolymers such as xanthan gum and curdlan enhance soil cohesion and water retention in eco-grouting and erosion control. The novelty of this review lies in its interdisciplinary scope, integrating microbiological mechanisms, materials science, and engineering practice to highlight how bacterial processes can transition from laboratory models to real-world applications. By combining quantitative evidence with critical assessment of scalability, biosafety, and regulatory challenges, this paper provides a comprehensive framework that positions construction biotechnology as a transformative pathway towards low-carbon, adaptive, and resilient infrastructure systems.

Consumption of raw or undercooked meat is responsible for 2.3 million foodborne illnesses yearly in Europe alone. The greater part of this illness is associated with beef meat, which is used in many traditional dishes across the world. Beneath the low microbiological quality of beef lies (pathogenic) bacterial contamination during primary production as well as inadequate hygiene operations along the farm-to-fork chain. Therefore, this study seeks to understand the microbiological quality pathway of minced beef processed for fast-food restaurants over three years using an artificial neural network (ANN) system. This simultaneous approach provided adequate precision for the prediction of a microbiological profile of minced beef meat as one of the easily spoiled products with a short shelf life. For the first time, an ANN model was developed to predict the microbiological profile of beef minced meat in fast-food restaurants according to meat and storage temperatures, butcher identification, and working shift. Predictive challenges were identified and included standardized microbiological analyses that are recommended for freshly processed meat. The obtained predictive models (an overall r² of 0.867 during the training cycle) can serve as a source of data and help for the scientific community and food safety authorities to identify specific monitoring and research needs.

Reducing the costs of repairing concrete structures damaged due to the appearance of cracks and reducing the number of people involved in the process of their repair is the subject of a multitude of experimental studies. Special emphasis should be placed on research involving industrial by-products, the disposal of which has a negative environmental impact, as is the case in the research presented in this paper. The basic idea was to prepare a mortar with added granulated blast furnace slag from Smederevo Steel Mill and then treat artificially produced cracks with a Sporosarcina pasteurii DSM 33 suspension under the conditions of both sterile demineralized water and water from the Danube river in order to simulate natural conditions. The results show a bio-stimulated healing efficiency of 32.02% in sterile demineralized water and 42.74% in Danube river water already after 14 days. The SEM images clearly show calcium carbonate crystals as the main compound that has started to fill the crack, and the crystals are much more developed under the Danube river water conditions. As a special type of research, microscopic images of cracks were classified into those with and without the presence of bacterial culture. By applying convolutional neural networks (ResNet 50), the classification success rate was 91.55%.