Topic awaiting preservation: Spider-Goat vs. Hagfish (Page 1 of 1)

Just caught a little blurb on TV and I thought it was rather cool.

Spider silk is good. Strong and flexible. So far, all attempts to create it in the lab have been largely thwarted. There was the spider-goat thing awhile ago, but so far have only been spun to 1/10 the strength of homegrown from the spiders' butt.

Enter the hagfish. As a defense mechanism and a way of hunting, the hagfish will extrete tiny balls of fibers that is very similiar to spider silk. When they hit the water, they unravel and form kind of a net. Like a 3d spider web suspended in water. It becomes a nasty slime.

This slime is very elastic. They tried stretching out a bunch of it, but the machine ran out of space to pull. That is, it could stretch more than the machine could test. Why, it was almost gruesome to watch.

However, the micro stretch test was a success. They took a tweeny-weeny strand of it and tugged it under a microscope. This one did eventually break and they ended up good numbers. Extrapolating the strength, a 1mm strand of hagfish slime is strong enough to lift the average human.

Holy stretchy snot balls!

The good news is that the proteins are simplier than spider silk. So far, much better success with lab production than with spider silk. Still in the testing phase, so not much about that just yet. However, looks very promising.

If this does work out, it's going to be very cool.

Incredibly cool. Wow!

: . . DHTML Slice Puzzle : . . . : Justice 4 Pat Richard : . .

Oh dear, sounds like the hagfish is getting popular...

http://oceanlink.island.net/oinfo/hagfish/hagfishathome.html