Lab-Grown Leather Could Be a Reality In 5 Years

As a motorcyclist, I'm really interested in this.

Although amazing progress has been made in synthetics, for heavy duty use (read, racing, trackdays, etc.) leather is still king. We've known for a while that there are benefits to the way cows are cared for. The most protective leather comes from cows that aren't kept in barbed wire fences, and raised above the mosquito lines; there is less damage to the hide that way, making for fewer potential points of failure.

Large sheets of leather are also valuable, as they reduce the number of seams in the leather, and permit them to be moved away from common abrasion zones.

Type of leather is also important to us... Good cow leather is usually at least 1.4mm thick, and a full leather suit can be quite heavy (>10lbs.) Kangaroo leather is desirable for this application, since it's lighter and often stronger than cow leather.

I'll be interested seeing what comes of these materials.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/GAFoWGzLhWw/lab-grown-leather-could-be-a-reality-in-5-years

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