To assess the ability of yeast to undergo polymerization across multiple generations, i.e. to consistently self-encapsulate even after shedding their polymer coating during cell divisions much like their natural ability to reform the cell wall after replication, the polymers of P13 cells were labelled with Cy5 (vide infra), after which the cells were allowed to grow for further 36 h on SG. As expected, flow cytometry showed that the original polymer coating had been "diluted" across generations, and most cells were lacking fluorescently labelled polymers. A new polymerization of PEGMA-N3 yielded once again a high conversion (88%) and allowed to label the polymer-coated cells with Cy5. The resulting population of fluorescently labelled cells showed a very similar flow cytometry result than the original generation of polymerfunctionalized cells, confirming the possibility of repeating the enzymatic polymerization process ad libitum (SI Figure ). This result is crucial in understanding the potential applications of self-encapsulating yeast in microencapsulation technologies, for example as supports for whole-cell biocatalysts. Engineering of the cell surface with PPEGMA Having confirmed the successful formation of a polymer brush on the yeast cells, we moved on to characterizing the effect the it would have on the microbes. Imaging of P8 showed that yeast had darker sections on its cell wall, compared to naked yeast, possibly due to the adsorption of the staining agent on PPEGMA (SI Figure ). P8 cells exhibited a slightly slower and limited growth (Figure ) but, fascinatingly, the PPEGMA layer seemed to be enough to hinder, to an extent, the digestion of the cell wall by zymolyase, thus increasing the number of surviving cells (Figure ).