Fibre Fusion: Circular Manufacturing of Water Repelling Bacterial Cellulose Through a Biological Approach

细菌纤维素已被确定为一系列纺织品的有希望的替代品。细菌产生的纤维素是纯净的(与植物性纤维素相比)，并提供一系列有用的特性，包括机械强度和生物降解性。因此，细菌纤维素也被认为在循环纺织品经济中发挥着关键作用。然而，BC的一个关键缺点是它的吸水能力，这改变了它的机械性能和形状。赋予BC防水能力的标准化学和物理后处理工艺通常是能源密集型、污染严重，并会破坏材料的生物降解性。我们的观点是，为了真正可持续，生物纺织品的制造不仅必须在生产中使用一系列生物过程，而且在后期生产中也必须使用。该项目的总体目标是生产适合于循环纺织生产的疏水BC材料。我们采用了一种生物方法，通过在BC基纺织品上涂上疏水蛋白质来制造拒水纺织品。疏水蛋白可以由工程微生物产生，在发酵间歇过程中合成，并被编程附着到BC聚合物上，以增加它们的健壮性。疏水蛋白质也可以用酶来分解，这将允许BC基材料被生物降解并回收用于新的BC制造。为此，我们将开发一个候选疏水蛋白质文库，并测试它们在不同制造工艺和BC纺织品生产的不同阶段的应用。我们将测试疏水涂层的有效性和坚固性，以及酶处理寿命结束的可能性，以保存糖和疏水蛋白以供重复使用。该项目汇集了一个由生物科学家、材料科学家、纺织专家和两个英国领先的工业合作伙伴组成的跨学科团队，其中包括Prozomix(工业酶开发商)和现代合成(一家致力于细菌纤维素制造的生物材料创新公司)。

Bacteria Cellulose has been identified as a promising material for the replacement for a range of textiles. Cellulose produced by bacteria is pure (compared to plant-based cellulose) and offers a range of useful properties, including mechanical strength and biodegradability. Bacterial cellulose, therefore, is also seen as playing a key role in the circular textile economy. A key drawback with BC however is its capacity to absorb water, which alters its mechanical properties and form. Standard chemical and physical post-production processes, which give BC waterproofing capabilities, are often energy intensive, polluting and take away the biodegradability of the material. Our view is that, to be truly sustainable, the manufacture of biological based textiles must make use of a range of biological processes not only in production, but in post-production as well. Overall aim in this project is to produce hydrophobic BC materials suitable for circular textile manufacture. We take a biological approach to making water repelling BC based textiles by coating them with hydrophobic proteins. Hydrophobic proteins can be produced by engineered microbes, synthesised in fermentation batch processes, and programmed to attach to the BC polymers increasing their robustness. Hydrophobic proteins can also be broken done using enzymes, which would allow for BC based materials to be biodegraded and recycled for new BC manufacture. To this end we will develop a library of candidate hydrophobic proteins and test their application with different manufacturing processes and at different stages of BC textile production. We will test the effectiveness and robustness of the hydrophobic coatings and the potential for enzymatic end of life treatments which preserve the sugar and the hydrophobic proteins for reuse. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of bio-scientists, a materials scientist, textiles specialist and two leading UK based industrial partners including Prozomix (an industrial enzyme developer) and Modern Synthesis (a biomaterial innovation company working on bacterial cellulose-based manufacturing).