Micro‐organisms and Textiles

The self-heating of wet wool

“…The bacterial counts in Table 4 show that below, say, 55°c self-heated wet wool has a large mesophilic population and above 50°c a large thermophilic population. It is generallyagreed (e.g., Burgess 1954;Crewther 1955) that wet wool provides an adequate medium for bacterial growth. Crewther (1955) has pointed out that many micro-organisms attacking wool cause a rise in pH, and that this is an important factor in initiating attack on the wool fibre.…”

“…Galloway and Burgess (1946) have stated that moulds can develop on commercially clean botany wool at 94% RH (corresponding to a regain of 24%), and that mould growth might be established at lower moisture contents in raw wool containing the normal impurities. Burgess (1954) has suggested that the existing commercial standards of regain for wool might be sufficiently high to permit mould attack in some grades of wool, and that it would therefore be advantageous for the textile industry to adopt lower standards of regain to avoid mould growth. The present experiments show that such mould attack could be responsible for heating in baled wool.…”

Microbiological Degradation of Wool

“…H o w ev er ev idence th a t n o n p a th o g e n s b elo n ging to th e b a c te ria [2,10,12,25,34,37,47,54], a c tin o m y cetes [10,25,29,34,45], actin o p lan es [21,32], phyco m y cetes [27,31,44], asco m y cetes an d im p erfect fu n g i [10,25,34,38,47,50,57] T h ese o b serv atio n s in d ic a te t h a t we lack m odel te s t sy stem s a p p ro p ria te b o th for c o m p a ra tiv e stu d ies and in v e stig a tio n o f th e b io c h e m istry o f d e g ra d a tio n . T h e p re se n t w ork is an e n d e a v o u r to o vercom e th is deficiency, b eg in n in g w ith the d ev elo p m en t o f a m eth o d for sterilisin g th e k e ra tin s u b s tra te th a t avoids d e n a tu ra tio n .…”