Textile genetics into the twenty-first century

Citation

Stylios, G.K. (1999), "Textile genetics into the twenty-first century", International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, Vol. 11 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijcst.1999.05811eaa.001

Textile genetics into the twenty-first century

The world-wide efforts for unravelling the human genetic code have produced incredible possibilities, some of which were unthinkable five years ago. Technologies such as fingerprinting, cloning and engineering, with their respective methodologies, are widespread amongst medical literature. But when we review recent research in textiles we can draw many parallels of the two disparate disciplines, some of which, I dare say, were started long before the recent medical advances.

I can draw comparisons on the efforts of the textile community to establish the fingerprinting of fabrics, the engineering of garment performance, the cloning of natural fibres into synthetics with the successful examples with the synthetic silks, leathers and paper. For two decades, fingerprinting of fabrics of ''fabric objective measurement'' has been developing and implemented by companies, many of which design and trade new fabrics with this technology. Artificial silks made of 100 per cent polyester have captured the market and the sucess story of SHINGOSEN of silk has gone beyond the easy care restrictions of the natural silk fibre. Nowadays, the new challenge is the cloning of the wool fibre and some new interesting results have recently occured in this area; and we can go beyond that; cotton crops are being induced to produce healthier seeds, sheep are being fed proteins and minerals to produce healthier wool. We may even go beyond that and examine the genetic code of the fibre itself, which may open more possibilities for apparel and industrial use. One can imagine a coloured fibre so that dyeing of the yarn may not be needed, a fibre longer, finer and more resilient or a fibre genetically fire resistant.

Textile genetics is not only about the fibre or the fabric, but the integration of the methodology along the chain from fibre, to yarn, to fabric, to garment and ultimately to consumer. What is interesting would be how we would be able to engineer consumer preferences to textile products right the way back to fibre so that surplus apparel can be reduced or eliminated.

Textile genetic engineering is a challenge for the next century. Would it be possible, for instance, to produce animal hairs by using laboratory skin cultures? Would this be the inevitable interdisciplinarity of science or is it mere scientific fiction which will stay in books and will never get into practice?

George K. StyliosEditor-in-Chief