Scientists growing colour without chemicals | Hacker News Reader

Scientists growing colour without chemicals

forbes.com

45 pointscaiobegotti24 comments

> Instead of mining oil or boiling vats of chemicals, Colorifix uses engineered microorganisms, (essentially programmable microbes) to grow colours in the lab.

Biotech is cool, but the title is wrong. "colour without chemicals" refers to "we don't need chemicals", e. g. industrial scale-level chemicals. But you actually do, you just use different chemicals; in particular all energy given to the bacteria, all materials needed to have them grow in the lab or in a bioreactor. All these media are also defined and need to be constantly monitored.

This is in general more efficient than in organic chemistry, but to insinuate "we need 0% chemicals" - sorry, that's also not the case. Also, the term "growing colour" is just wrong from a scientific point of view. You may have organisms grow, and they may produce some pigments in some substance - but that is not "growing colour". This is just a catchy title to make people be more interested in the topic. I think the topic is interesting without a need for catchy titles.

From the title I was expecting that they are creating structural colors, which you could "grow" and which don't need chemicals. Finding out that it's chemical dye made by bacteria really feels misleading

I mean, even then you're growing it from chemicals. Unless you're straight up converting energy to matter (in which case, it would be kind of odd the first practical application they think of is making colors).

Well, the counterargument is that in theory, you can imagine a way to create structural color regardless of substrate. So imagine a technology that shines a laser on a car or a block of concrete and makes it blue; I'd argue that's correctly "without chemicals".

Of course, I doubt you can do that to any random substrate, since the color will depend on the properties of the material.

  So imagine a technology that shines a laser on a car or a block of concrete and makes it blue

There is something like that for sheets of steel at least https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ncEfAxkuFA

And here is a video explains it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsGHr7dXLuI

In the sense that everything is chemicals, yes. But you typically wouldn't describe a butterfly growing a wing or a welder making a blue weld from metals that are normally very much not blue as "growing from chemicals". I guess you could argue about the butterfly, but I think few people would say that chemicals are involved in welding steel, despite iron, carbon and tungsten being chemical elements

The few people that would say that chemistry is part of welding "steel" (what type of steel? what type of metal? how about aluminium? etc) includes welders.

eg: https://youtu.be/nfNvuTMDXNg?t=1420

In which a good machinist from Queensland, Australia discovers a crack and states he'll have to get the metal tested before he can repair the crack.

You know, to match the chemical composition, expansion rates, etc.

> Using DNA sequencing found in nature, scientists can copy the genetic code for the blue in a butterfly wing.

The blue morpho is actually blue from iridescence, not pigment.

Damn, you got to this before I did!

The pigmentation of the morpho butterfly is a result of the microscopic shape of the scales which refract and diffract light. The actual pigmentation of those scales is not blue. If you took the DNA for the pigments in the butterfly scale you'd probably get some dull color.

This phenomenon is called "structural color"

The genetic and developmental pathway for butterfly scales is actually driven by what biologists call Notch signaling, which is the same signaling pathway that drives differentiation of the hair cells within your cochlear which you use for hearing.

I was even hoping this is what the article would be about.

Whether it's made by microbes or industrial processes, the dye is still chemicals. Every physical object is chemicals. The microbes are made of chemicals and make chemicals.

But the article is clearly talking about those artificial chemicals that aren't natural!

Probably more importantly though, there's no particular reason the chemicals made by bacteria should be safer or less impactful to the environment.

There's a few reasons to think that would tend to be the case, but any given compound isn't magically safe for human exposure because a micro-organism synthesized it.

I mean the downstream processes for extraction after biosynthesis are different and generally less likely to introduce other harmful chemicals.

That's really not true though. The downstream processes after biosynthesis will have steps like "lyse all the cells open" and ,"definitely and thoroughly kill them and the off target proteins".

Like you're going to do a lot of very specific, biotoxic things.

It has water as the solvent so plenty of techniques here that dont involve toxic things such as rapid heat pasteurization, as is done in milk processing. Also see centerfugation, crystalization, filtration, etc. You can lyse all cells with shear force easily by mixing excessively fast.

No archive link, OP? No cookie for you.

https://archive.is/xcOwc

Rather… muted… performance, for better or for worse:

https://www2.hm.com/en_gb/productpage.1011927001.html

> “[Synthetic dyes] provide a wide colour spectrum, which brands like, and deliver predictable results - perhaps why no viable solution has been able to compete.”

Just to indulge my inner HN ultra-pedant… if a solution is viable, doesn’t that suggest that it’s competitive?

> ” Instead of mining oil or boiling vats of chemicals, Colorifix uses engineered microorganisms, (essentially programmable microbes) to grow colours in the lab.”

What is the distinction between coercing bacteria to synthesize molecules and using chemistry to synthesize molecules (from, say, hydrocarbons)? Does the source of the dye affect the amount of water they need to fix the dye to the textiles?

If we’re still dunking textiles in vats of dye (just from living microorganisms instead of Paleolithic ones), how does that address:

> ”Textile dyeing is actually one of the most chemically intensive and polluting elements of garment production, accounting for roughly 20% of global industrial water pollution.”

> Just to indulge my inner HN ultra-pedant… if a solution is viable, doesn’t that suggest that it’s competitive?

In the economic sense, maybe. But I think they meant viability in the technical sense there.

Semi-offtopic question, if I were to go to the shop and buy a piece of clothing colored with "normal" means, which colors are generally the least taxing on the environment? Some time ago I tried searching for an answer to this question online, but I couldn't find anything useful.

The difference in any choice you could make would be orders of magnitude less significant than a rounding error. How they are cleaned and how often they are worn out and replaced, though?

I've heard that a major hurdle for these "cell-factories", is moving from lab to industrial scale. Ofc initial cost of the product is typically also a lot higher, but that is the same of any product addressing externalities of existing production

Have there been any studies on the harmful effects to the body of wearing denim?

> Transforming a $2 trillion-dollar supply chain does not come without its challenges. Colorifix’s technology may be simple to implement, but scaling it globally means convincing the big names this is the right idea for them, never mind navigating strict regulatory frameworks.

I wonder if the environmental costs of dyes are externalized to taxpayers and private individuals, like many other environmental costs. That reduces the incentive for the supply chain.

Imagine if the 'green' solution saved them money. Then they'd be funding R&D more avidly (some are, per the OP) and rushing to implement the cost advantage over competitors.

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