The three companies have joined forces to develop a new luxury alternative to traditional leather. This sounds quite ordinary- nothing but the material they are trying to create.
On Friday, April 25, Creative Agency VML and Biotech Companies Lab Grown Leather Ltd. and Organoid Company announced a “first” partnership. Their goal: to create a cruel, environmentally friendly, high-quality alternative to traditional leather, allegedly used Tyrannosaurus DNA. According to the company statement, the partnership aims to leverage “the biology of the past to create the luxury of the future.” What is captured is that they have not fully explained how they will do this – some researchers are very skeptical.
“Using fossil T-Rex collagen as a blueprint, the production process will involve engineered cells with synthetic DNA,” the statement said. “Unlike other biologically based alternatives, the “scaffold-free” approach of laboratory-grown leather allows cells to create their own natural structures, resulting in the same material as traditional leather.”
Collagen is a rich protein in all animals and provides structural support for muscle, bone, skin and connective tissue. Although researchers have recovered collagen up to 195 million years of history from dinosaur fossils and other remains, DNA decays rapidly. This means that scientists can’t study dinosaur DNA directly, they have to reconstruct it in other ways.
VML did not respond to Gizmodo’s request to clarify its process. However, according to the Times, researchers plan to use artificial intelligence to create T. Rex Collagen fragments of collagen.
Like all proteins, collagen is made from amino acids whose sequence is determined by nucleotide bases (genetic codes) in DNA or the gene “instructions” of how to make a specific protein.
In an email to Gizmodo, Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist who earned her PhD from Harvard Medical School and is the founder of Oscillators, a design service company, who believes researchers may use collagen sequences to work backwards and rebuild DNA that encodes proteins.
Regardless of whether the researchers use this approach or not, they plan to insert collagen-built DNA into cells that will be inserted – Supported – T. Rex According to the lab growing leather website, skin. In tissue engineering, scaffolding is the material that provides structural support as the organization develops. By growing without this structure, these companies seem to suggest that the end material will be exactly like natural leather.
According to Agapakis, the researchers had previously tried to recreate leather from cells from 2004, including harmless leather jacket prototypes. Because “it is still difficult to produce leather of any size from cells,” Agapakis said, who was happy to see their results and learn about the process.
There is only one problem. “You can’t make leather from collagen,” Mary Higby Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, told Gizmodo. “Leather is suntan from the skin,” she added. It is mainly made of “epithelial tissue. These are made from keratin in all terrestrial vertebrates.”
More broadly, Schweitzer, who was not involved in the project, said she wouldn’t have been from T. Rexdue to the preserved peels of the plant skin samples are extremely rare. Specifically: “I won’t T. Rex Collagen, you will notice that they have not mentioned how they get or T. Rex It comes from. “Schwettzer said. The idea is cool, but I don’t think the press release is very accurate.” She added: “It’s wrong to call it T. Rex leather. ”
Still, one can argue that bioengineered leather (whether it is made) is better than traditional leather, and the industry is associated with deforestation and large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. but As Agapakis noted, consumers considering sustainability can simply choose a frugal handbag made of recycled materials.
Nevertheless, the novelty of this project attracted Agapakis. “If I wanted something great – in the real meaning of the word, I would use lab leather, using collagen sequences from 68 million historic T-Rex Tissue samples,” she said. “I think it’s not just ‘sustainability’.”
The companies plan to start with fashion accessories and then expand to luxury flagships by the end of the year. Online, they hope to bring alternative leather to other areas, including the automotive industry.
This latest partnership makes a similar project and controversy. Last month, biotech’s giant bioscience claimed to have brought back extinct horror wolves. The announcement sparked a heated debate about whether the cub was a real wolf or a mere GMO gray wolf.
Understandably, whether alternative leather for VML, Lab Grown Leather Ltd. and Organoid Company will really be really rebuilt T. Rex Skin, or just dinosaur-style lab-grown leather. Both projects, if anything, reflect the growth of a company’s trend toward using science to legitimize ideas that may be engaging on its own, only being overshadowed by suspicious claims.
