Clothes are a second skin - no other product is quite as intimate. We dream of our flavonoids being used to dye clothes which are beautiful and meaningful; to create an everyday magic within anyone’s reach. It is thus our top priority to ensure that our dyes, which will be in constant contact with one’s skin, is safe for everyone to use.

Beauty comes at an ugly cost. The fashion industry is the second largest polluting industry in the world, second only to fossil fuel energy production. According to Mr. Vinod Agnihotri of LANXess, the most toxic part of the fashion industry is the manufacturing of synthetic dyes. Not only does it take a toll on factory workers’ health, but also the effluent is often discharged into nearby water bodies, harming the local flora and fauna, as well as severely decreasing the quality of life of everyone living nearby. It is difficult to get rid of synthetic dyes once they are released into the environment because they have been designed to be extremely persistent. It feels great when our clothes still look brand-new after a long time, but it’s bad news for the environment.

Our team decided that producing natural dyes instead could be a suitable substitute for synthetic dyes because they are non-toxic, and synthetic biology has the potential to overcome the current challenges facing natural dye manufacturing, and finally make natural dyes a viable alternative to synthetic dyes.

And so, the time came for us to start developing a synthetic biology solution to this problem. We knew that it was of fundamental importance that we adhere to lab best practices because if we can’t follow safe microbiological lab procedures, and prove that it is possible to produce our dyes safely, how can we expect anyone to be convinced by our solution?

As word of our project spread, designers like Leong Minyi expressed interest in using our dyes. We were reminded that we needed to consider the future of our project and how it would impact society.

At that time, we were filling in the first draft of safety forms, the very same one we mentioned earlier. However, our excitement to share our project with the world was dampened when we realized that the iGEM safety rules stated that we were not allowed to release any products derived from our work in the lab. Nevertheless, we firmly believed that our project deserved to be released, so that we could get useful and important feedback from our targeted end users, designers, as well as show the world the revolutionary potential of synthetic biology.

Hence, we wrote to the iGEM Safety Committee with a protocol we developed for ensuring that the product we extract is microbe-free:

We first centrifuge our bacterial culture at 5,000rpm to pellet the cells. The supernatant containing the flavonoid dyes is subsequently sterilised by filtration using the 0.22um filter. Next, we plate the filtered supernatant on LB (lysogeny broth) agar plates with and without antibiotic (which the genetically engineered bacteria are resistant to; e.g. kanamycin, chloramphenicol). This decontamination protocol ends by incubating these plates overnight in 37 degree Celsius.

The absence of colonies on both plates will indicate that our dyes are free from any microbes.
We are proud to say that this protocol has been approved by the iGEM Safety Committee!

After approval, we were spurred on to develop a biomanufacturing process that uses as little potentially toxic, harmful, or pollutive chemicals as possible. If it could have a positive impact on the environment, even better. To do this, we explored some novel methods to increase the eco-friendliness of our biomanufacturing process.