T-Rex leather handbags could be made using fossil DNA
Lab-Grown Leather, based in Newcastle, teamed up with The Organoid Company to grow extinct hides using dinosaur DNA.
A full-length collagen sequence will be generated for the dinosaur, which will be used to grow new skin.
Until recently, it was thought dinosaur DNA would be impossible to find because the fragile strands do not survive over tens of millions of years.
However, in the past decade, paleobiologists found collagen preserved in dinosaur fossils, including an 80 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex.
'Innovative and ethically sound'
In 2023, Lab-Grown Leather became the first biotech company to successfully culture fully natural animal skin, and now believes it can use its technology to recreate T-Rex hide. The team believes the leather will be tough and durable, and hopes to have its first product available by the end of the year.
Prof Che Connon, of Lab-Grown Leather, said: 'We're unlocking the potential to engineer leather from prehistoric species, starting with the formidable T-Rex. This venture showcases the power of cell-based technology to create materials that are both innovative and ethically sound.'
Lab-Grown Leather was the first to create animal skin without using a scaffold to coax the tissue into the correct alignment. Instead, scientists managed to recreate the biochemical and biophysical cues that occur in the body to make the cells spontaneously arrange themselves in the correct pattern.
It means that there is no need to use animal-derived serums to help kick off the growth process or blends and fillers that other synthetic meat and skin companies need, which prevents products from feeling natural.
Without the need of artificial scaffolds or fillers, the leather that is produced is 100 per cent animal tissue, without any extra animal products.
To create T-Rex leather, the team plans to piggyback on recent research that extracted a fragment of the collagen protein from a T-Rex fossil.
The Organoid Company will use the fragment to recreate what the full-length T-Rex collagen would have looked like, then convert it into a DNA sequence and engineer it into the Lab-Grown Leather cell line genome. If all goes well, it should produce a dense network of T-Rex collagen, similar to a dermis.
The dermis is the structural part of skin, which is all that remains after tanning, so the process should re-create T-Rex leather.
Thomas Mitchell, the chief executive of The Organoid Company, added: 'This project is a remarkable example of how we can harness cutting-edge genome and protein engineering to create entirely new materials.
'By reconstructing and optimising ancient protein sequences, we can design T-Rex leather, a biomaterial inspired by prehistoric biology, and clone it into a custom-engineered cell line.'
'Ground-breaking collaboration'
Fossils suggest that T-Rex skin was scaly, rather than having feathers like many dinosaurs, so the result is likely to be close to that of modern reptiles.
The experts are working alongside VML, a Netherlands-based innovation company, which helped to create the first meatball made from the DNA of a woolly mammoth in 2023.
The team took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavour, and filled in the gaps using elephant DNA.
'With T-Rex leather, we're harnessing the biology of the past to create the luxury materials of the future,' said Bas Korsten, the global chief creative officer at VML.
'This ground-breaking collaboration represents the intersection of creative innovation and cutting-edge biotechnology, much like we did with our mammoth meatball project.'
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