Researchers at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, one of nine outcroppings in the windswept Isles of Shoals six miles off the coast of New Hampshire, are looking at the commercial potential of invertebrate hagfish to make a high-performance material.
University of Guelph researcher Doug Fudge and collaborators at the University of British Columbia have been granted a patent for the commercial use of hagfish nanofilaments. The researchers are seeking a means to concentrate proteins in hagfish slime in solution and are attempting to use electrospinning to assemble it into threads.
Hagfish, an ancient quasi-invertebrate fish and relative to the sea lamprey, produces a clogging slime as a defense against suction feeding teleost fishes. Tiny cytoskeleton filaments in this gelatinous slime could be used to make a high-performance material, the researchers say. The slime is made from protein filaments that have the same ultra-strong properties of spider webs, said Fudge. He and Guelph post-doc student Atsuko Negishi positioned hagfish microfilaments as an alternative to spider silk because the proteins that build the slime are much easier to amplify in a vector. “It sort of got us excited because it’s similar to spider silk,” Fudge said.