Clothes Made Of Living Cells For No-Sweat Sports Sessions

There are a lot of materials that can be used for clothing. From plant fibers to cotton, to leather, and even plastic. However, scientists recently came up with a way to create clothing made of living cells. Not only that, it can also cool the bodies of its wearers, which has the potential for no-sweat sporting activities.

The new type of clothing was created by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and it is made of microbial cells, Futurism reports. It’s meant to be breathable, lightweight, and self-ventilating. It even comes with a pair of shoes that also have the same materials so that they possess at least some of the same qualities.

In the paper that the researchers published, they cite how natural organisms are capable of regulating behavior and chemical makeup. They basically tried to adapt these properties to clothes, as noted on the Abstract in Science Magazine.

“Cells’ biomechanical responses to external stimuli have been intensively studied but rarely implemented into devices that interact with the human body,” the paper reads. “We demonstrate that the hygroscopic and biofluorescent behaviors of living cells can be engineered to design biohybrid wearables, which give multifunctional responsiveness to human sweat. By depositing genetically tractable microbes on a humidity-inert material to form a heterogeneous multilayered structure, we obtained biohybrid films that can reversibly change shape and biofluorescence intensity within a few seconds in response to environmental humidity gradients.”

As to how the scientists actually managed to achieve this feat, they basically took cells from E. coli microorganisms and then printed them onto sheets made of latex. By messing around with the design of the cells in order to provide ventilation, the material was made into a futuristic sportswear that will allow its wearers to regulate their temperatures a lot easier. This makes sweating less of an occurrence.