Sweat-Eating Bacteria to Live in Your Clothes

amyaimee writes: "Perfect for you hygiene-challenged computer geeks (you know who you are): New Scientist reports on a new clothing made of milkweed containing a special strain of e. coli designed to feed on human sweat and the proteins that cause B.O. Alex Lightman of Charmed Technology quips, "I wear the same pair of jeans all the time and I'm sure they have bacterial colonies living in them, but if they were selected to convert my sweat into sweet-smelling pheromones, that would be great," he says."

Comments

Milkweed Clothing

[Dr_Cheeks]

Mmmm, sounds so appealing. Wouldn't it be simpler to just put these in a deodorant stick/ball/spray? That way you can apply them direct to your sweaty bits. For example - if the British summer ever gets warm enough I frequently take my shirt off, but my pits still sweat. Plus, this wouldn't mean you have to replace your entire wardrobe - you could just change deodorant.

Incidentally, does anyone know just how close to the skin these clothes have to be? I don't want to have to have a permanent wedgie when it's warm just because my ass sweats a lot.

My clothes smell like:

[atrowe]

Option 8: Richard Stallman.

Wait, I guess that's the same as Option 5: "That homeless guy on the subway".

are these researchers smoking the milkweed?

[circletimessquare]

bacteria are bacteria are bacteria...

yeah sure, you can engineer them to manufacture some phermones, or lilac scent, or febreeze, or whatever as a byproduct of their metabolic efforts, but:

the majority of their metabolic byproducts will still be what makes them "gross": lactic acid, butyric acid, tartaric acid, other nasty smelling compounds...

it's hard to simply edit these compounds out of the bacterial output, as these compounds are simply the natural chemical dead-ends to well-established bacterial metabolic pathways.

"well, you can engineer other processes to destroy these compounds as well"

...but there is a reason why these compounds are natural chemical dead-ends... they are energetic dead-ends as well: it's breaking the second law of thermodynamics: you can't have the bacteria churning out more energetic chemical processes than the energy you give them... there's a reason lactic acid is a dead-end chemical street: the bacteria have evolved to extract as much energy from a chemical source as they could, and they have, and they do... there's no getting around that energetic roadblock...

plus, like any other ecosystem: the savannah, a coral reef, your intestines, there is a bitter battle for survival raging.

it has been proven that bacteria without antibiotic resistance successfully displace and kill off bacteria with antibiotic resistance in the wild... why? because to defend themselves against antibiotics, resistant bacteria are exerting a hefty metabolic toll in order to survive... without antibiotics to worry about, those bacteria who are free to devote all of their metabolic efforts to survival and reproduction will outcompete their metabolically-hobbled cousins...

so what do you think will happen in these milkweed clothes when mr. i-make-phermones bacteria functioning at 70% metabolic maximum due to it's genetically-engineered burden is forced to compete for food with mr. wild-as-i-wanna-be bacteria functioning at 100% metabolic maximum? hmmph