"Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) experiment with using living bacteria that grow, weave, and dye their own fabrics in every color of the rainbow. The team's idea is to replace chemical-based textile production with a natural process that uses microbes instead of oil, plastic, or artificial dyes. In doing so, they have shown how living bacteria can create bacterial cellulose, a material that can be used as fabric,"
"It is produced when certain microbes grow in a nutrient-rich liquid and spin out long cellulose fibers. This material can also be harvested, cleaned, and dried to make a flexible sheet that can work like fabric. The researchers use a bacterium called Komagataeibacter xylinus, also known for producing cellulose. To add color, they use another group of bacteria that naturally make pigments that belong to two pigment families: violaceins and carotenoids. The former create colors from green to purple,"
Living bacteria can create bacterial cellulose, a fibrous network produced during fermentation that can be harvested, cleaned, and dried into flexible sheets resembling fabric. Komagataeibacter xylinus produces cellulose fibers during growth. Separate bacterial strains naturally synthesize violaceins and carotenoids, yielding colors from green to purple and red to yellow respectively. Co-culturing cellulose producers with pigment-producing bacteria in the same container caused growth interference, poor cellulose layers, or weak pigmentation. The process was adapted into two systems. For cool colors such as blue, purple, and green, a delayed co-culture method was employed, allowing the cellulose-producing bacteria to form a network before pigment producers were introduced.
Read at designboom | architecture & design magazine
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