The fungi can regrow, potentially fixing tears in items one day made from the alternative leather:
Imagine if a ripped leather jacket could repair itself instead of needing to be replaced.
This could one day be a reality, if the jacket is fashioned from fungus, researchers report April 11 in Advanced Functional Materials. The team made a self-healing leather from mushrooms' threadlike structures called mycelium, building on past iterations of the material to allow it to fix itself.
Mycelium leather is already an emerging product, but it's produced in a way that extinguishes fungal growth. Elise Elsacker and colleagues speculated that if the production conditions were tweaked, the mycelium could retain its ability to regrow if damaged.
That novel approach could offer inspiration to other researchers trying to get into the mycelium leather market, says Valeria La Saponara, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of California, Davis.
Elsacker, a bioengineer now at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and her colleagues first grew mycelium in a soup rich in proteins, carbohydrates and other nutrients. A skin formed on the surface of the liquid, which the scientists scooped off, cleaned and dried to make a thin, somewhat fragile leather material. They used temperatures and chemicals mild enough to form the leather but leave parts of the fungus functional. Left dormant were chlamydospores, little nodules on the mycelium that can spring back to life and grow more mycelium when conditions are prime.
After punching holes in the leather, the researchers doused the area in the same broth used to grow it to revive the chlamydospores. The mycelium eventually regrew over the punctures. Once healed, the hole-punched areas were just as strong as undamaged areas — however, the repairs were visible from one side of the leather.
Journal Reference:
DOI: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202301875
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday April 25 2023, @05:19PM (1 child)
So they can turn it on to regrow. I gather the process to turn that off again is the trade secret, or more correctly they appear not to know exactly since they'll be working on that, since I can't find any mention of it. After all you wouldn't want it to accidentally start and stop, apparently they have control issues so if they turn it on again it might be a lengthy process to turn if off again. No mention either about how long it takes to regrow, is it sci-fi fast so you can see the damage heal or is it more gradual over days and weeks? Also then how many times can you turn it on and off again (no joke intended)? That it shows that it's regrown is less of an issue really.
That said I don't think I would care for any fungi "leather", I don't think I'll ever see it or consider it to be actual leather -- just like it's not milk if it's now from an animal, soy-bacon/burgers/whatever are not those things either they are just fungi with flavoring but that wouldn't sell as well. So marketing ploys.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday April 26 2023, @12:05AM
I think I saw one of those awful but "great" scifi movies about that when I was a kid. Something like "Attack Of The Mushroom People" maybe. I'm surprised MST3K hasn't chosen that one.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by datapharmer on Tuesday April 25 2023, @05:39PM (1 child)
I can’t wait for the future where I can get a fungal infection from my couch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2023, @07:29AM
When I was reading it, I was considering the interior of my shoes while I was wearing them.
Warm, moist, and already making known there's something else living in there besides my foot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimios on Tuesday April 25 2023, @06:11PM (8 children)
Fungi share more DNA with animals/humans than plants. It's less vegan than people think.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday April 25 2023, @06:14PM (7 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Disagree) by BlueCoffee on Tuesday April 25 2023, @07:49PM (3 children)
They are called vegetarians, which is the term most people who call themselves vegans actually fall under due to their meat-cheat days.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday April 25 2023, @08:05PM
If there was only one kind of them. They all want to be special or different somehow. It was easy when it was just "I don't eat meat" or "I only eat vegetables". But now there appears to be levels of veganism. Apparently some of them allow themselves to eat certain things such one would think was very non-vegan. There appears to be vegans that eat fish, drink milk (even the cow kind), eat dairy products etc. My favorite kind are the drunk vegans that after a drunken evening will scarf down multiple burgers/kebabs or whatnot. Apparently veganism can take a little break every now and then from their high moral pulpit.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday April 25 2023, @08:12PM
Heh. You don't have a very high opinion of me, do ya. There is a term for specifically what I described. On a less hectic day for me I'd look it up.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by xorsyst on Wednesday April 26 2023, @08:50AM
No they aren't, vegetarians do not eat fish.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Tuesday April 25 2023, @08:12PM (1 child)
Piscatorians? But those seem to be anglers.Perhaps piscavores?
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Opyros on Wednesday April 26 2023, @01:43AM
Pescetarians. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday April 26 2023, @09:13AM
Pescetarians [wikipedia.org]? To be honest "vegan-esque fish-eaters" is probably a better description, as it is immediately understandable, rather than people going "What? What's that word?", and then you having to go into a long explanation.
Although those are people who are vegetarian, but in addition eat fish. You could do the same if you are vegan: practise a vegan diet with the exception of eating fish.
Of course, the definition of 'fish' is not entirely clear. Does it actually mean 'seafood', so crab, lobster, shrimps, and prawns are ok? How about eels, or lampreys, and bivalves and other molluscs (oysters, whelks/periwinkles, scallops, razor-shells, clams, abalone, octopus, squid) and things like sea-cucumbers. Mediaeval monks felt that any aquatic creature counted as 'fish', so that included whale, dolphin, beaver, and otter, and latterly, capybara; there was a push for barnacle geese to be included due to the belief they grew from barnacles [wikipedia.org].
So eating 'fish' covers a multitude of sins.