Color-changing materials with controllable photoswitching properties are highly desirable for
technical and smart textile products. In the quest for innovative light-responsive textiles, many efforts
have been made to develop materials that can be easily incorporated into fibers and/or fabrics by
conventional dyeing, printing or coating processes. Current developments commonly incorporate
photochromic inks that undergo a color change upon irradiation with light of a specific wavelength
and revert to the original color when the light source is removed. However, these inks are based
on substances obtained by non-sustainable petroleum-based organic synthesis and do not allow
controlled light-driven switching between colors.
In this context, biomolecules which can be easily obtained by biotechnological means and that combine fast and easily tunable fluorescent properties, appear as a more eco-sustainable and highly
appealing alternative with a wide range of promising applications.
Therefore, this work explores the development of a new generation of eco-sustainable inks that take
advantage of the unique optical properties of selected reversibly switchable fluorescent molecules
(RSFMs) for the fabrication of innovative textiles with photocontrolable photoswitching fluorescent
properties (Figure 1).This work was developed in the framework of EcoBioInks4SMartTextiles project (refs. POCI-01-0145-
FEDER-030298 and PTDC/CTM-TEX/30298/2017), co-financed by the European Regional Development
Fund (ERDF), through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization
(COMPETE 2020), under Portugal 2020, and by national funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e
a Tecnologia, I.P..info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
