Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

Posted by speckx 14 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by AlanYx 12 hours ago

The claim in the article that saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) naturally produced the deep blue color in the butterfly example is not actually true, although it's a gorgeous effect.

These are genetically engineered variants of brewer's yeast designed to produce pigments.

Comment by Forgeties79 12 hours ago

Wow you weren’t kidding that’s a beautiful color

Comment by inigyou 11 hours ago

You can buy this color for 3€/meter at any weekend fabric market.

Comment by AlanYx 11 hours ago

You could, but getting it from pigments in a chitinous matrix produced by genetically engineered brewer's yeast is just a little bit cooler.

Comment by pessimizer 10 hours ago

I think they're saying that's exactly what you're buying for 3€/yd.

Comment by inigyou 10 hours ago

No, I'm saying if the color is the only part you want, you can get it more easily.

Comment by Forgeties79 4 hours ago

Ok? I just think it’s neat.

Comment by bofadeez 11 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by dustfinger 12 hours ago

I wonder if there is a health hazard wearing this due to breathing in spores or toxins released into the air? Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin? Very interesting none the less. I have imagined humans making living clothes for a long time, so it is nice to see that idea materialize.

Comment by dylan604 11 hours ago

"Following drying at 45 degrees, the material is not quite living and not quite dead, but instead in a "low-metabolic, dormant-like state", Li told Dezeen, meaning it is not actively growing."

Don't think spores will be an issue since it's not the mycelium's sex organ mushroom that you're thinking of

Comment by fluoridation 10 hours ago

It depends on the species. Some fungi like molds do directly sporulate from the mycelium.

Comment by dylan604 5 hours ago

From TFA: "These are mixed in with the cordyceps militaris"

"Many authors consider C. militaris quite common, spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere,[6] and fruiting bodies appear in Europe from August to November."[0]

That sounds like a mushroom to me

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps_militaris

Comment by svachalek 12 hours ago

It seems telling that none of the photos show anyone wearing it.

Comment by Qem 11 hours ago

> Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin?

Or just getting a bad itch.

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY 10 hours ago

Some people are very allergic to mushrooms. I wonder if that would extend to this.

But it's pretty cool.

Comment by funkygibbon 12 hours ago

I would buy one, but I don’t think I have mushroom in my wardrobe for it.

Comment by samudrijan 10 hours ago

Soylent queen

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by juancn 12 hours ago

How does it smell though?

Comment by dhosek 11 hours ago

I didn’t think of the smell at all, I was wondering what the feel was like. There’s a certain level of comfort that’s expected from clothing that matters. There’s also the question of breathability. Is it going to trap sweat and smells like polyester clothing?

Comment by other_herbert 6 hours ago

If you sweat in this though, would it grow from the moisture or get killed off by the salinity? either way could lead to new and unexpected failure modes for clothing

Comment by ComputerPerson 12 hours ago

Most people associate mushrooms and fungi with the smell of their substrate; they commonly don't have a strong smell themselves

I doubt it has a smell stronger than the wearer

edit: this is a bad take, upon further research

Comment by AlanYx 11 hours ago

The mushroom smell isn't from either the substrate or respiration. That distinct odor is 1-octen-3-ol. Biochemists call it "mushroom alcohol." It's caused by enzymatic breakdown of their cell walls, and it thought to be related to signalling.

I doubt it would be strongly present here. The article says the mycelium are close to dormant.

You can actually purchase mushroom alcohol commercially as a food additive.

Comment by _whiteCaps_ 12 hours ago

Chanterelles smell great. I would wear something that smelled like that.

Pine mushrooms, not so much.

Comment by fluoridation 12 hours ago

I've done cultures on agar agar and mycelium definitely does have a distinctive smell. To me it's reminiscent to the damp smell of a concrete basement, though less stale and unpleasant.

Comment by dylan604 11 hours ago

probably smells like patchouli

Comment by londons_explore 10 hours ago

I put a load of washing on, then ended up in hospital for a year.

On return, the contents of the washing machine were pretty much this.

Comment by asveikau 10 hours ago

Sounds like quite an ordeal, hope things are going well now.

Comment by andai 12 hours ago

Could they make a house out of this?

Comment by bastawhiz 11 hours ago

It doesn't seem to have the rigidity to be structurally sound for construction.

Comment by dylan604 11 hours ago

my tent material doesn't have rigidity to it either. if we change out the word "house", it could be an interesting material to play with for other types of shelter. it's supposed to be hydrophobic, but how hydrophobic? a light spritz or spilled drink or holds up in the rain?

Comment by kxjwidjwjdj 10 hours ago

Mr Stamets (both real AND fictional) must be proud as heck!

Comment by hercynium 10 hours ago

Cordyceps, huh? An interesting choice! And ironically the subject of an article on Ars Technica that just dropped...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/parasitic-zombie-fun...

Comment by kxjwidjwjdj 10 hours ago

How is that ironic?

Comment by hercynium 9 hours ago

I'm guessing that the OP didn't know about the Ars article when they posted. Perhaps "serendipitously" would have been a better word?

Comment by sajithdilshan 11 hours ago

This would turn into a mould infested nightmare

Comment by josefritzishere 12 hours ago

Is there an adjective for something that's nifty but also gross?

Comment by sdellis 12 hours ago

Blursed!

Comment by kibwen 12 hours ago

I'm not sure it's any more objectively gross than normal textile materials. Imagine you lived in a hairless, furless world where nothing like wool was a thing, and then suddenly we discovered a weird fluffy mammal that extruded long fibers out of its flesh; the people of that world might call that gross, we'd just call it ordinary.

Comment by 10 hours ago

Comment by chrisjj 13 hours ago

> nutrient solution is applied over a hole, along with a small patch of fresh fungus

So, not repair itself.

Comment by dustfinger 12 hours ago

To be fair it only claimed "near self-repairing".

Comment by cestith 12 hours ago

One could think of it as mostly self-repairing with some outside encouragement.

Comment by soiltype 12 hours ago

The headline is more ambitious, that's probably what they meant

Comment by chrisjj 12 hours ago

Nope. "Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself".

Comment by bastawhiz 11 hours ago

Exactly. You can place a patch with some glue over a hole in fabric to achieve the same thing in a traditional garment. Iron-on repair patches are also similar.

It's one thing to say "get it wet and leave it in the sun". It's another thing to require identical replacement material and nutrient slurry (I don't know about you, but I think I can source fabric glue more easily than potato water).

Comment by andai 12 hours ago

Does the fresh fungus need to be genetically identical? I read something about mycelial nuclei in high school and it was weird.

Comment by fluoridation 12 hours ago

I guess they're just trying to get the networks to interlace, not to reconstitute into a single organism and be capable of nutrient exchange, so I don't think it matters if they're identical or not.

Comment by LoganDark 11 hours ago

Is there a possibility of the organisms escaping the material and infesting the environment? That's what I would worry about with mycelium.

Comment by bamboozled 9 hours ago

Researchers in China have created a textile from living mycelium that is self-cleaning, near self-repairing and can be coloured or made UV protective through "plug-and-play" add-ons of different fungi or yeast.

near self-repairing

Comment by meindnoch 11 hours ago

Pretty disgusting tbh.

Comment by onlypassingthru 10 hours ago

Neat. Wearing some hibernating Cordyceps clothes seems like a good way to speedrun some life-imitates-art The Last of Us gain of function research.