Clothes made from living fungi can clean and repair themselves
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- Ke Li and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences grew Cordyceps militaris — the caterpillar parasite fictionalised in The Last of Us — as spherical pellets in liquid culture, then molded them into a self-supporting sheet without any conventional polymer mesh or scaffold.
- The fungal sheets were soaked in glycerol to keep them flexible, producing a material Li describes as denser than cotton and closer to a soft, leather-like non-woven sheet with no strong mushroom odour after cleaning.
- Engineered yeast cells were added to the textile to produce orange, blue and purple pigments biologically, while Aspergillus niger (a common fruit-and-vegetable mould) was layered on the surface to deposit melanin that absorbs UV radiation.
- When the textile is cut or torn, fresh wet fungal pellets applied to the breach simply regrow over the damage, and the entire material showed near-complete visible degradation in soil after just over 40 days.
- Justin Beardsley at the University of Sydney called the biodegradability remarkable compared with fast-fashion waste but flagged the catch — the same property means a garment "could break down while you're wearing it" — and said he envisions toggling properties like water-repellency on and off in real time.
- The team has produced a dress from the material but no one has worn it yet; Li said future versions should be tested on "a few petite and adventurous volunteers" to see how it behaves in motion.
Why it matters: If scaled, the material could replace petroleum-based textiles with something that fully disappears in soil within roughly 40 days, tackling the fast-fashion waste problem Beardsley flagged. The tradeoff Beardsley named — a garment that could break down mid-wear — is the central engineering hurdle before any commercial use, and Li's team has yet to put the dress on a human body.
