Clothes made from living fungi can clean and repair themselves — SkimNews
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- Ke Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues built a living textile from Cordyceps militaris — a fungus harmless to humans despite its zombie-apocalypse role in The Last of Us — whose properties can be programmed by introducing different microbial components.
- The material is grown as fungal pellets in liquid culture, then placed in moulds where intertwined hyphae form a continuous, self-supporting sheet with no conventional fabric, polymer mesh, or external scaffold required, soaked in glycerol to stay flexible.
- Engineered yeast cells applied to the textile produce orange, blue, and purple pigments biologically instead of synthetic dyes, while Aspergillus niger was added to create a melanin-rich dark surface layer that absorbs ultraviolet radiation and other fungi can make the material water-repellent.
- Damaged areas can be repaired by applying fresh, wet fungal pellets that simply grow over the breach, and the dormant cells can reactivate under humid conditions — the same latent biology that enables regrowth also drives near-complete visible degradation in soil after just over 40 days.
- The team produced a dress from the fungal material but has not let anyone wear it; Li treated it as a "precious display piece" in a small size and said she is considering recruiting "petite and adventurous volunteers" for a future trial.
- Justin Beardsley at the University of Sydney called the biodegradability "amazing" compared with fast-fashion waste but flagged the trade-off — "you don't really want to be wearing something that is too easily biodegradable, as it'll break down while you're wearing it" — and envisioned a future version that could toggle water-repellence and breathability in real time.
Why it matters: The textile's near-complete soil biodegradation in just over 40 days directly addresses the fast-fashion waste problem Beardsley highlighted, yet he warned the same trait means a garment could compost while still in use. A material that self-repairs, dyes itself biologically, and toggles UV and water protection on demand points to a new class of garments — but no human has yet tested whether the living dress survives actual wear.
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