Developing technologies of future new materials with slim slim made from eel DNA

Speaking of eels, it is a summer scenario that I want to eat as a slice of pickled vegetables etc, but "Nutakutsugi"Slime" released from the body has attracted attention as a part, as it has a wonderful potential as a fiber like a spider's yarn.

DNA From This Ugly Fish Is Being Used to Synthesize Bulletproof Slime | Motherboard
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dna-from-this-ugly-fish-is-being-used-to-synthesize-bulletproof-slime


Overseas, it is a honeysuckle called "slime eel", but the slime that this creates in the body is attracting great attention as it may be able to produce biodegradable plastics and much lighter bulletproof clothing than the current one It is. There are skulls in nutter eagles, but there is no spinal vertebrae, and scientists are a kind of creatures that can be discussed separately as to whether they should be classified as vertebrate animals or not. Such a nut group is a living creature living about 300 million years ago, "A living fossilIt is also an integral part of life called.

You can tell what kind of slime is released from inside of the body by nutake and kore by looking at the following movie.

Hagfish Slime - YouTube


This is a nut only. It seems that the eyes are degenerate and buried in the skin, so the appearance seems to have no eyes.


Part of the water is white and muddy, but this is the slime released by the honeysuckle. There are countless ejection holes on the side of the body.


When grasping this with the hand ......


Detecting danger and squirting slime. It is still difficult to understand because it is underwater image, but if you look closely around the body of the nuts eagle, you can see that it is covered with things like transparent liquid.



And when raising from water it slims in the hands.


The movie is not being played back in slow motion, all things like clear liquids about hands are slimy slims.


Now I am trying to get only the slime part.


Slime grows.


This is a slime released by the honeysuckle. It will be transmitted from movies well that it will have a considerable viscosity.



In addition, the following article shows how a honeysucket fight off an enemy using this slime.

Movie in which deep-sea fish nutter eagles repel sharks due to slimy mucus slime attack - GIGAZINE


When a nutake eagle detects a danger, the slime that releases to the body side contains small fibers that are thinner than 100 times the size of human hair, and this fiber is stronger than nylon fiber and Kevlar fiber of the same size. In addition, the fibers contained in the slime released by the honeysuckle have a plurality of properties very similar to spider threads and, furthermore, from genetically it is much simpler than the spider's yarn, so this fiber is synthesized from DNA It seems much simpler to produce spider threads.

I am doing research to inject nut Eun's DNA into bacteria and produce nuta won fiberBenthic LabsRussel Banta of Mr. Russel Banta said, "While there are 300 million years since the honeysuckle appeared on the earth, nutter ebony has not made a big change so far, we believe that this is because evolution ceased And because evolution has already stopped, it is much easier to collect the fibers contained in the slime of the nuts eagle than to spider spider from bacteria. "

In the work of Mr. Banta et al., We first extracted the DNA related to the protein of Nut Dry (raw material of slime). thisPlasmidThen put this solution into the bacteria. Then, the bacteria will produce some of the fibers contained in the slime produced by the honeysuckle. Mr. Banta tried to produce spider's yarn in bacteria in the same way, but this did not go well and it seems that the cause is "in the complexity of spiders' DNA" is.


It was not Mr. Banta who sees the potential of the slime of a honeysuckle. At the beginning of 2014Nature CommunicationsIn a paper published at one of the researchers, a researcher announced how slime is generated in the body of a nuts eagle. As I looked at this paper, "This paper has become an important breakthrough to create the fibers contained in the slime of the nuts eagle in the laboratory," Banta says.

In addition, it is said that bacteria are produced by some of the fibers in the slime released by the honeysuckle, while in Benthic Labs the investigation of other substances necessary for reproducing the fibers is under way.