Say goodbye to chemical dyes! Would you dare to wear clothes dyed with bacteria?

A French company is developing a bacterium that can produce ink and dyes, meaning we may no longer need to use petroleum and toxic chemicals to synthesize dyes.

What gives your clothes color? Nowadays, people usually use petrochemical dyes to dye their clothes. Now, the French company Perak has brought a brand new way – using sugar as a substrate and cultivating bacteria on it to produce dyes.

At the Perak Labs in Paris, Thomas Landrean and his co-founders realized an idea they had had three years ago. At that time, they wanted to create a bacterial pen that only needed to add sugar to allow bacteria to produce ink. At the heart of the product is Streptomyces South America, which produces blue pigment, and now Landrean and his colleagues have figured out how to extract the pigment and write with it.

His team is experimenting with using bioinks in inkjet printers and exploring how they could be used in the textile industry. Through many explorations, such as providing different types of sugar, changing temperature or reaction time (in other words, changing the living environment of microorganisms), they have mastered methods to control ink production, and can even induce Streptomyces and some other bacteria Produces red, yellow, orange and purple dyes.

“We started thinking, is there a way to make this colored fuel a viable alternative to modern petrochemical fuels,” Landrean said.

Many dyes are mixtures of petrochemicals or organic pigments, and some contain mixtures of heavy metals such as cadmium and lead. The ink of our common carbon gel pens is the product of burning petroleum. “We’re envisioning a future without petrochemical dyes,” Landrean said.

Harold Freeman, a professor at North Carolina State University who has been engaged in research on organic dyes and pigments for many years, said that the Landrean team’s idea is great. Modern dye products often rely on corrosive substances such as nitric acid, and biosynthetic products like this may make modern dyes less dependent on corrosive substances.

“If you choose carefully, you will find that biosynthetic products are a great choice.”

Dolly Johnson of the University of California thinks their idea is promising. More and more companies are developing biosynthetic technologies for use in commodity chemistry, which is indeed a great progress. Biosynthetic products, it is absolutely right to choose it.

In 2013, Johnson was part of a team working on genetically engineering E. coli to produce indigo, the dye used in jeans. Like Perak, Johnson’s team is also looking for alternatives to synthetic dyes. Synthetic dyes are an energy-intensive industry and rely on petroleum. Johnson’s colleague, John DeBoer, is continuing research in hopes of commercializing the product.

Producing a little dye in the laboratory is just a small experiment, and truly meeting the needs of industrial dyeing is a real feat. It is understood that 40,000 tons of synthetic indigo are required for printing and dyeing denim cloth every year. Wanting to increase bacterial production means…We must precisely understand the conditions required for bacterial growth in order to maximize yield.

Perak is also experimenting with using bacterial dyes for clothing printing and dyeing. Currently, Pili Company is increasing the application of microbial dyes in clothing. When dyeing clothes, researchers will use heat to kill bacteria or wash the bacteria directly from the clothes.

If it is to completely replace petrochemical dyes, bioink production must be very efficient so that it can compete with the scale and cost of current printing and dyeing.

Bacterial dyes are not limited to industrial use. London-based scientist and designer Ness Audrey Cheza has a project that uses dyes produced by bacteria to print patterns on fabrics. She wanted to turn her technique into a craft, her artistic vision into a series of scientific steps that anyone could use.

Bioproduction of dyes is still in its infancy, but if it succeeds, it could revolutionize how we print and dye fashion.