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.
The blue morpho is actually blue from iridescence, not pigment.
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.
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.
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.”
In the economic sense, maybe. But I think they meant viability in the technical sense there.
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.
