{"id":112884,"date":"2022-07-19T07:16:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-19T05:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=112884"},"modified":"2022-07-19T08:29:29","modified_gmt":"2022-07-19T06:29:29","slug":"scientists-develop-new-material-inspired-by-limpets-with-super-strength","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/scientists-develop-new-material-inspired-by-limpets-with-super-strength\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists develop new material inspired by limpets with super strength"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

The small aquatic snail-like molluscs use a tongue bristling with tiny microscopic teeth to scrape food off rocks and into their mouths.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Scientists
Scientists have recreated the incredible strength of limpet teeth in the lab for the first time. \u00a9<\/strong> University of Portsmouth<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

These teeth contain a hard yet flexible composite, which in 2015 was found to be the strongest known biologically occurring material<\/a>, far stronger than spider silk and comparable to man-made substances, including carbon fibre and Kevlar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team has now successfully mimicked limpet tooth formation in a laboratory and used it to create a new composite biomaterial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study, published today in the journal\u00a0Nature Communications<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0suggests it has\u00a0the potential to be upscaled into something that could rival the strength and flexibility of synthetics, but be disposed of without generating harmful waste products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Robin Rumney, Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Portsmouth<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lead author Dr Robin Rumney, from the University\u2019s School of Pharmacy andBiomedical Sciences,<\/a> said: \u201cFully synthetic composites like Kevlar are widely used, but the manufacturing processes can be toxic, the materials difficult and expensive to recycle. <\/p>

\u201cHere we have a material which potentially is much more sustainable in terms of how it\u2019s sourced and made, and at the end of its life can be biodegraded.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s thought the secret to the limpet tooth\u2019s strength is a unique structure containing a combination of flexible tightly packed fibres of a scaffold material called chitin, interspersed with fine crystals of an iron containing mineral called goethite. Those fibres are laced through each other in much the same way as carbon fibres can be used to strengthen plastic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers developed methods which allowed these cell populations to grow outside of their natural environment on serum-coated glass, where they deposited chitin and iron oxide just as in the limpet tooth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remarkably, after two weeks they self-organised into structures that resembled the limpet organ, known as the radula, which makes the teeth. This kind of extremely powerful regeneration has also been observed in sponges, but they lack the complex arrangement of tissues and organs found in limpets and other molluscs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Rumney even found ways of growing ribbons of teeth from tissue samples and individual teeth from populations containing stem cells. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI spent six months setting up this process\u201d, he added. <\/p>

\u201cI went through every kind of permutation I could think of for what the cells might need and how they\u2019d grow.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s very different to growing bacteria or cancer cells which commonly grow in a lab environment, so we had to work out from scratch what would work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After successfully replicating the limpet tooth formation, the team was then able to produce samples of biomaterial half a centimetre wide. They did this by mineralising a sheet of chitin, which is a waste by-product of the fishing industry found in the exoskeletons of crustaceans, crabs, and shrimps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Limpet
Limpet inspired biomaterial stained with Prussian Blue dye which binds to iron \u00a9<\/strong> University of Portsmouth<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Now that proof of concept has been established, Dr Rumney and the team want to explore the possibility that these minidiscs can be scaled up and mass manufactured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said: \u201cOur next step is to find other ways of getting the iron formation occurring, so we\u2019re studying the secretions of the limpet cells to better understand that. If it works really well,\u00a0then we already have the gene readouts of the organ so we can lift the genes of interest out, and hopefully put them into bacteria or yeast to grow them at scale.<\/p>

\u201cObviously we have a plastics crisis in the oceans right now, and I think it\u2019s a nice symmetry that we can learn from a sea creature how to better protect them by replacing the use of plastics with a biological substitute.<\/p>

\u201cThis has been a truly interdisciplinary project, with full support from marine biologists and active involvement from our resident bioinformatician who quantified all of the gene readouts from the radula which makes the teeth. We also could not have met our aims without the engineers who carried out X-ray analysis and mechanical testing, and chemists who helped develop the material.”<\/p>

Senior author of the paper,\u00a0Professor Darek Gorecki<\/a>\u00a0from the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Science at the University of Portsmouth, said: \u201cI started this as a curiosity project with a challenge to see if\u00a0we grow\u00a0cells from\u00a0limpet’sradula using principles applied in my lab for culturing mammalian cells.<\/p>

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t just a blue-sky research, where real-world applications are not immediately apparent, it was almost a pie-in-the-sky project. When it works, this is where science is at its best.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The small aquatic snail-like molluscs use a tongue bristling with tiny microscopic teeth to scrape food off rocks and into their mouths. These teeth contain a hard yet flexible composite, which in 2015 was found to be the strongest known biologically occurring material, far stronger than spider silk and comparable to man-made substances, including carbon fibre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","nova_meta_subtitle":"An interdisciplinary team of biologists, chemists, and engineers from the University of Portsmouth have become the first to successfully grow a limpet inspired biomaterial with extreme strength","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[11270,5838,14924,11785,11877],"supplier":[1880],"class_list":["post-112884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-biodegradability","tag-bioeconomy","tag-chitin","tag-composites","tag-naturalfibres","supplier-university-of-portsmouth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112884\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112884"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=112884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}