Color changing sutures (Dasia Taylor)

Dasia Taylor is a 22-year-old Entrepreneur who created color changing sutures to detect infection and founded the company Variegate. Variegate means to change color which is a very cool idea for a company that creates color changing sutures. She came up with her sutures and created them while being a junior in high school. Her junior year of high school they were hosting a science fair and she wanted to participate. She originally had no idea what she wanted to do for the science fair, she just knew she could be in the science fair. After some thought she turned to sutures and medicine. Dasia had always liked medicine and had just got a suture kit for Christmas her sophomore year of high school. She also used to watch Gray’s Anatomy, and she had a teddy bear that she would cut open and stich back together. So, she was researching and found a website that talked about high-tech smart stiches. She then got the idea for color-changing sutures, she told her teacher about her idea and her teacher suggested that she find natural indicators. Dasia researched and found out that certain plants have substances that can be extracted to reveal the pH of other thing by changing color. So, Dasia researched the regular pH of wounds when they were not infected, then she needed to find a plant that would change the color of the sutures if the wounds pH changed. Then doctors and patients would be able to easily tell if a wound was becoming infected and treat it before it became a true problem. She finally landed on beets, if the pH in the wounds changed the color of the beet juice would change color therefore showing an infection in the wound. Dasia is now continuing to work on her product and expand her new company.