While the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world, most of the ecological harm caused by textile processing occurs at the finishing and the dyeing stage.

Coelicolor is an organism, a power house for synthesizing organic chemical compounds. It produces an antibiotic called actinorhodin, which ranges in color from blue to pink and purple, depending on the acidity of its environment.

Project Coelicolor by Faber Futures is based in this simple question:

If a bacteria produces a pigment, how can we use it to dye textiles?

The project achievement answer is the growth of the organism Streptomyces coelicolor directly onto silk, where each colony produces pigment around its own territory.

This process generates very little runoff, and produces a colorfast pigment without the use of any chemicals while can also generate an organic pattern, a uniform dye or a graphic print.

Fossil fuel-based activities are reshaping the earth in a way that is capable of dramatically change the climate, accelerating a loss of biodiversity.That means we need to find new materials systems that are not petroleum-based.

In the textile industry, most of the ecological harm occurs at the finishing and the dyeing stage. One example is the use of huge amounts of water.

Faber Futures brings critical design thinking to life science technologies like synthetic biology, exploring and enabling compelling and preferable biodesign futures.

One of its research projects is Project Coelicolor based on this simple question:

If a bacteria produces a pigment, how do we work with it to dye textiles?

The answer the project found is on the growth of the organism Streptomyces coelicolor directly onto silk, where each colony produces pigment around its own territory. How that works?

When adding cells into the fabric, they generate enough dyestuff to saturate the entire cloth.

One magical thing about dying textiles in this way, through direct fermentation when you add the bacteria directly onto the silk, is that to dye one t-shirt, the bacteria survive on just 200 milliliters of water.

So the process generates very little runoff, and produces a colorfast pigment without the use of any chemicals.

After they’ve established the baseline for cultivating Streptomyces, so that it consistently produces enough pigment, they turn to twisting, folding, clamping, dipping, spraying and submerging.

Which begin to inform the aesthetics of coelicolor’s activity.

And using them in a systematic way enables the generation of an organic pattern, a uniform dye or a graphic print.

To scale these artisanal methods of making so it can be used in industry, the project used a bio reactor. This reactor contains a type of microorganism brewery containing yeasts that have been engineered to produce specific commodity chemicals and compounds. Those yeasts are connected to a suite of automated hardware and software that read in real time and gives feedback to a design team the growth conditions of the microbe.