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Revision as of 21:22, 28 October 2013
The industrial dyeing process is ecologically unfriendly: indigo is made from an oil derivative (benzene) via high-heat and harsh chemicals. For the indigo to actually adhere to fabric, a further step, using a harsh reducing agent, is necessary to solubilize the dye.
Research has shown that the leaves of indigo-producing plants contain two enzymes, a glucosyltransferase (GT) and a glucosidase (GLU), which together control indigo solubility by inter-converting indigo with a soluble form called indican. We propose a biological dyeing method that harnesses this pathway in a bacterial chassis.
We demonstrate indican production using a recombinant GT (for the first time ever), prove indican irreversibly dyes fabric with the use of a GLU, and reduce our system’s costs by optimizing indoxyl (an indican precursor) production and taking into account other innovative design choices. As a whole, our work has created an entirely new way to dye denim with purely biological inputs which, with continued optimization, could compete economically with current industrial methods.
Read on to learn more about our nature-inspired system!
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The UC Berkeley iGEM team would like to thank Autodesk, Agilent, Synthetic Biology Institute, Qualcomm, Dean A. Richard Newton Memorial Chair for their financial support, IDT for discounted oligos and Quintara Bio for discounted sequencing service.
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