Cordyceps couture: Living textile almost self-repairs
In China, a team of researchers at Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology have created a textile out of mycelium that can almost repair itself. Unlike previous mushroom-based textiles that grew mycelium but killed it to stop growth, the Shenzhen team used dormant cordyceps militaris. This created a material that self-renews. The team also showed that they could tweak the fungi to include UV resistance.
Material innovation company Peelshere, based in Berlin, even made a dress out of the engineered living material. The material was not quite able to fully self-repair because, while the living mycelium could regrow and reconnect across damaged areas, the researchers found that the repaired sections did not completely restore the material’s original mechanical performance.
The next step is to refine the material’s growth and repair capabilities, improve its mechanical recovery and environmental stability, and scale up production for practical applications such as adaptive textiles and architectural biomaterials.
The findings were described in a recent issue of Science Advances.
Category: Chemicals & Materials
