Creating The Greenest Possible Clothing With Living Fungi

Despite the wide variety of fabrics used for our clothing, they all share the property of not being living tissues. This could be due to them never having been part of an organism, or having been removed from said organism. Another approach here entails so-called engineered living materials (ELMs), with a recent research article by [Ke Li] et al. in Science Advances providing a good example of a fungal platform for such living textiles.

Although it may seem frivolous to create something like this, the direct benefits would be to have a fabric that can self-heal and respond to its environment, including blocking UV radiation and changing its coloring through pigmentation.

The research demonstrated in this paper covers essentially a platform for creating a living textile that can be adapted to a wide variety of applications and colorizations. Of note is that the researchers have not yet tested aspects like washability, abrasion resistance, breathability and wearer comfort, so this should definitely be regarded as setting the stage for more research.

For the basic material the fungi Cordyceps militaris was chosen, which were subsequently placed between films. To this additional microbial cultures were added, including the pigment-producing S. cerevisiae and melanized A. niger for UV blocking.

As for what it can look like with clothing, this article at De Zeen gives somewhat of an idea, as well as how the living textile is prepared.