https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/47cada1c-bea1-4270-8f70-841278e34870 Title: IRIS-Iris Revival via Inanimal Synthesis Description: The kingfisher feather owes its iridescent blue not to pigment, but to nanostructure — keratin layers and air gaps that sort light at the nanoscale. For centuries, diancui artisans harvested these feathers for jewelry, driving the species toward extinction. Today, the bird is protected under CITES, and the craft has no legal material source. IRIS tackles this problem from the materials side: if the blue comes from physics, not biology, then the bird is not the only way to produce it. We engineered a microbial platform that converts textile waste into cellulose nanocrystals, which co-assemble with recombinant reflectin proteins into ordered films. The resulting material produces structural color through the same thin-film interference mechanism found in feathers — iridescent, angle-dependent blue, grown from waste instead of taken from wildlife. Wiki | Official Page Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:55:11 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://video.igem.org https://video.igem.org/client/assets/images/icons/icon-1500x1500.png https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/47cada1c-bea1-4270-8f70-841278e34870 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://video.igem.org/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.