(This article is also available in German)
Many fashion labels have said goodbye to products with real fur. Luxury manufacturers like Gucci and Prada have merged with mass brands like H&M and C&A Fur Free Retailers Program Committed. Only the fashion label Fendi, which belongs to the luxury group LVMH, continues to stick to real fur. Fendi is now also looking for alternatives that should give fur lovers the real feeling. Previous faux fur products often look real and also adorn luxury products, but usually don’t feel real enough.
For its project, the fashion label gets help from biotechnology and finances a two-year research project at Imperial College London. Under the direction of Bioengineer Tom Ellis is said to be the German biochemist Pascal Püllmann Produce fur hair precursors using genetically engineered yeast cells. Like our hair and nails, fur consists of combinations of the protein keratin. If you have the DNA assembly instructions, you can introduce them into the yeast cells, which use them to produce the proteins.
The right keratin recipe for fur
However, mammalian genomes contain 100 to more than 200 keratin genes. Two of these keratin variants are stored together independently and – in sufficient quantities – result in the great diversity of fur hair, but also of human hair and our nails, for example. In addition, keratins are also found as structural building blocks in skin cells, for example.
Püllmann is a yeast specialist and has already developed many yeast production systems in his doctoral thesis. In this research project, too, he has to modify yeast cells appropriately so that they not only produce the desired proteins efficiently, but also release them into the nutrient liquid surrounding them. From there, the keratins can then be cleaned. At the same time, he will also look for suitable fur-keratin variants and combinations in the DNA sequence databases and insert them into the yeast cells.
The project is one of the first of its kind as it aims to produce a two-brick product. Previous natural protein production focused on polymers such as collagen, which consist of individual building blocks (monomers):
It would be easier to extract and sequence the RNA intermediate of keratins from fur animal hair follicles. But Fendi’s specification is strict: real animals may not be touched, even for the taking of tiny samples. Only existing sequence databases are allowed.
No real animals for collection
“It is important that the project is not about having yeast cells produce entire fur hairs. The yeasts are far too small compared to the hairs for that. We use the cells as bio-factories to produce fur building blocks,” explains Ellis. The two keratin molecules then store themselves together independently and form a kind of microfiber. Project partner from the London Art and Design School Central Saint Martin should then investigate how the fibers can be processed into fur and how good customer acceptance would be.
If you succeed in bringing the right keratins together, the fur from the laboratory should not only feel like real fur later on, but also behave like real fur due to its structure. “Real fur sheds snow and ice, but faux fur will stick and clump together,” says Ellis.
(vsz)
