Science and WeatherSlimy hagfish mucus could be the future of clothing
If science fiction has taught us one thing, it's that everyone will be wearing spandex jumpsuits in the future, and a team of researchers from the University of Guelph believe they have found a renewable source to fulfill the coming demand — fish slime.
They have been studying the hagfish, also called the 'slime eel' — a long, thin bottom-feeder fish that has been around since before the dinosaurs, that produces a clear, thick slime when it's threatened or agitated.
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This video from the Vancouver Aquarium shows its slime production in all it's grotesque glory:
"They're maybe not the prettiest of creatures to work on, but I have a lot of respect for them," says Tim Winegard, one of the researchers who is studying the hagfish slime, according to a BBC News article. "These guys have been around through just about everything. They're a winner in terms of outlasting dinosaurs and many, many mass extinctions."
What's so special about this slime is what its made of — mucus and fibres. The mucus isn't much use to us, but once the fibres are washed, they are thin, silky, stretchy, and. perhaps above all, strong.
The researchers — Professor Doug Fudge, research associate Atsuko Negishi, and researcher Tim Winegard, from the University of Guelph's Department of Integrative Biology — believe that these fibres may be useful in creating fabrics for athletic wear or possibly even body armor.
Scientists have looked into using spider silk for this kind of use before, but as Prof. Fudge's research group points out on their website:
Artificial spider silk has been hailed as a renewable, protein-based high performance fibre, although spinning artificial spider silk has proven far more difficult and expensive than anyone could have originally imagined.
For this reason, we are employing a biomimetics approach to explore other natural fibres that could serve as more viable models for spinning high performance renewable fibres.
Biomimetics is the study of using designs from biology and nature to inspire how we create new materials and engineer new machines.
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Production is the biggest hurdle in the hagfish slime supply, though. Although each 30 cm hagfish can have hundreds of thousands of kilometres of fibres in it (according to the BBC News article), farming them won't be possible, for one simple reason.
"We know very little about hagfish reproduction, and no-one has ever gotten hagfish to breed in captivity — amazing as that sounds," Fudge told BBC News. "Right now, we literally couldn't have hagfish farms the way we have cows or chickens, or any other domesticated animals in captivity."
Instead, Fudge and his team are looking for ways to produce synthetic fibres that match the properties of the ones found in hagfish slime. Since the hagfish fibres are much less complex than spider-silk fibres, they believe that it will be much easier to produce them using bacteria — a renewable and relatively inexpensive means of production.
(Photo courtesy: Andra Zommers, University of Guelph)
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