A living fabric grown from a fungus that repairs itself

A fabric that is not woven but grown, able to repair and clean itself. The material was developed by the group led by Ke Li, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, and is described in the journal Science Advances.

The starting point is a fungus, Cordyceps militaris, a parasite of beetles and moths used in China as an ingredient in traditional medicine. Grown in liquid culture as small spherical pellets and then poured into moulds, it produces hyphae, the microscopic tubular filaments that make up its structure. The hyphae interlace and form a continuous sheet, which is stiff and brittle. To make it usable the researchers soak it in glycerol, a plasticiser that makes the weave flexible without breaking down its fibres.

Repair and colour

The most unusual property concerns maintenance. The fabric regenerates its own surface without artificial treatment: wherever the structure tears or gets dirty, new pellets are inserted and fresh tissue grows from there.

Adding engineered microbial partners then produces materials with different properties. Certain modified yeasts generate orange, blue and purple pigments and colour the sheet. A layer of Aspergillus niger, the mould that appears on rotting fruit, forms a dark, melanin-rich film on the surface that absorbs ultraviolet rays. Another combination repels water droplets and makes the material self-cleaning.

The applications named by the authors range from architecture to biomedicine, and on to adaptive fashion and environmental technologies. Being biodegradable, the fabric is presented as a solution for circular fashion. That is exactly where the drawback lies: in soil, decomposition takes around 41 days.

To show what the material can do, the group produced, among other things, a butterfly in blue fabric and a dress.