Leather bags and purses are a luxury item loved across the world. However, it involves a cruel process, and companies producing leather goods from the skin of cows, crocodiles and other animals are slammed for their practices. Three companies have joined hands to produce an ultra-luxury leather alternative, minus the cruelty. 

Advertisment

Creative agency VML and biotech companies Lab-Grown Leather Ltd. and The Organoid Company are vying to create leather from Tyrannosaurus rex DNA. That doesn't seem real, but they promise a cruelty-free, environmentally friendly, high-quality alternative to traditional leather.

“Using fossilised T-Rex collagen as a blueprint, the production process will involve engineering cells with synthetic DNA,” they said in a statement.

Also Read: 10-foot-tall 'Lovelock' mummies fuelled theory that giants roamed Earth thousands of years ago

Advertisment

They said in a statement that they are vying to harness "the biology of the past to create the luxury materials of the future." But how exactly are they going to lay their hands on T rex DNA isn't clear. Experts do not think they can do it.

To study dinosaur DNA directly, scientists have to reconstruct it since it decays quite rapidly. While collagen up to 195 million years old from dinosaur fossils has been recovered, to use it to create leather seems like a fantasy.

Using AI to create T. rex collagen

Advertisment

But the companies seem to have a plan. The Times reported that using artificial intelligence, they will create a replica of T. rex collagen from preserved collagen fragments.

Also Read: India in danger zone as out-of-control spacecraft comes crashing down, estimate suggests

According to the Lab-Grown Leather website, the researchers will insert the collagen-building DNA into cells and believe that they will turn into T. rex skin. But is that possible?

Christina Agapakis, a synthetic biologist with a PhD from Harvard Medical School and founder of the design service company Oscillator, told Gizmodo that the researchers might use the collagen sequence and work their way backwards to reconstruct the DNA. 

She says that in 2004, a Victimless Leather jacket prototype was created after researchers tried to make leather from cells. 

Others believe that it is not possible to make leather from cells as it is "tanned from skin", which contains "epithelial tissues." Mary Higby Schweitzer, a molecular palaeontologist from North Carolina State University, told Gizmodo, she "wouldn’t start with T. rex collagen."

She points out that the companies don't say "how they got that or which T. rex it came from." 

“It would be wrong to call it T. rex leather," she added.

Even if it isn't leather from T. rex in the real sense, Agapakis thinks anyone looking for something "awesome" would go for "lab-grown leather using sequences of collagen from a 68-million-year-old T-Rex tissue sample."