Bioremediation and upcycling of textile fibers using fungal-bacterial co-cultivation.

Global activities from the textile industry impact the environment negatively, while effective textile waste recycling solutions remain underdeveloped. Textile waste mainly consist of polymer blends, including cellulose, PET, and azo dyes. White rot fungi are well known for recycling organic material while naturally feeding on (hemi)cellulose and detoxifying their environment from lignin-like aromatic components. Additionally, recent innovations in biomaterial production demonstrated their capacity to generate leather-like materials. Nevertheless, filamentous fungi remain a relatively understudied group of microorganisms even though they’ve already found many uses in industrial bioremediation roles, such as dyes wastewater from the textile industry.
On the other hand, genetically engineered Bacillus are used to produce PETase and MHETase enzymes that efficiently degrade the most abundant textile fiber in the world: polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The possibility of co-culturing these microorganisms for cellulose, PET and dyes biodegradation on textile waste combined with the valorization of the produced biomass as a sustainable leather-like material has not been explored yet. Here, I propose to study how Trametes versicolor responds when grown on different types of textile fibers by analyzing its transcriptome and finding inducers for relevant genes involved in substrate degradation. Then, by developing a fungal-bacterial co-cultivation setup, I aim to achieve an efficient recycling system for textile waste where B. subtilis with enzymatic PET degradation capabilities will assist the fungus. Ultimately, using newly designed mycelium material production protocols, I will assess the potential of the generated biomass from the recycling process to produce mycelium leather-like materials.