23rd August 2018

DNA, data and dye: Faber Futures in the Forbes Pigment Collection

Buried deep in Harvard Art Museums, the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies hosts a library like no other.

The Forbes Pigment Collection is an expansive vault of 2,500 pigments, from colours excavated at Pompeii to the notorious Vantablack – the darkest ever manmade substance composed of rows of carbon nanotubes and officially licensed to artist Anish Kapoor. It’s used by conservators and art experts to restore damaged paintings with the exact same paints that their long-dead authors would have used or, in cases of foul play, to compare suspected forgeries against the pigments used by artists in very specific locations and time periods.

Among the array of rainbow-hued tincture bottles, a new dye has recently joined their number – a pigment extract from of Streptomyces coelicolor, which, when it comes into contact with textiles, creates a colourfast finish ranging from midnight blue to bright pink. What’s more, within this vial lies an archive label like no other: a sequence of DNA that when translated, spells out key information about the organism’s use case as a textile dye. Also included are details about the authors of the project, the medium and the organism’s complete genome.

A sample of Streptomyces coelicolor with encoded DNA, Faber Futures in collaboration with Gingko bioworks for the Forbes Pigment Collection 2018. Photography by IMMATTERS.

The brains behind Colour Coded is Natsai Audrey Chieza, the founder of London based biodesign studio Faber Futures. Operating at the intersection of design and biotechnology, Faber Futures co-creates new materials and products with living systems, like bacteria for sustainable futures. For the last 8 years, Natsai has developed design-driven methods of working with S. coelicolor as a beautiful and potentially more sustainable alternative to industrial dyeing. It not only offers a chemical-free process but uses radically less water.

Working with a team of biological engineers at Gingko Bioworks to encode data about her enduring work with S.coelicolor’s in textile dyeing into DNA, Natsai also incorporated that DNA sequence into a pigment extracted from the microbe, effectively tagging the material with metadata in DNA code. ‘DNA is fast emerging as a viable mechanism to store data,’ Natsai tells us. ‘Encoding data into DNA could enable us to store information for at least 700,000 years, and unlike using semiconductors as memory storage interfaces, DNA has magnitudes more capacity to compress and store data at levels that so far remain unprecedented. This means in the future, we might even be able to store all the information in the world in a space no larger than a wardrobe.’

Natsai Audrey Chieza, founder of Faber Futures.

Natsai’s decision to imbue the S. coelicolor sample with the DNA information came from the Forbes Pigment Collection itself. ‘When you dig deeper into the archive you discover that each sample is part of a rich repository of knowledge spanning our histories, industrial revolutions, artistic movements and a collective socio-cultural realm,’ she says. ‘Colour has played and continues to play a huge role in how we perceive and frame our realities. So the library provides a new point of departure from any curious mind to learn about our world from the molecular to the macro scale, and all of the complexities that emerge from that.’

Intrigued by the possibilities of co-designing with living systems? Read more about Faber Futures founder Natsai Audrey Chieza here.

A sample of Streptomyces coelicolor with encoded DNA, Faber Futures in collaboration with Gingko bioworks for the Forbes Pigment Collection 2018. Photography by IMMATTERS.

Natsai Audrey Chieza's TED Talk 2017: Fashion has a pollution problem. Can biology fix it?

To find out more about how we distill Natsai’s vision for this rapidly emerging and complex field of biodesign, take a look at what we do for her on her client page here.