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posted by takyon on Monday July 01 2019, @12:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the ants-in-my-pants dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Found: A sweet way to make everyday things almost indestructible

A new discovery from the University of Virginia School of Medicine reveals how sugars could be used to make almost indestructible cloth and other materials. Nature figured it out long ago, but the answer has been hidden away in bubbling baths of acid.

In certain acidic hot springs, even volcanic hot springs, live ancient single-celled organisms that can exist in conditions far too extreme for most forms of life. They have tiny appendages called pili that are so tough that they resisted UVA scientists' numerous efforts to break them apart to learn their secrets. "We were unable to take these things apart in boiling detergent. They just remained absolutely intact," said researcher Edward H. Egelman, PhD, of UVA's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. "So we then tried much harsher treatments, including boiling them in lye, which is sodium hydroxide. Nope."

The researchers tried several other approaches before throwing up their hands and turning to cryo-electron microscopy, which allows them to image submicroscopic things almost down to individual atoms. What they found was shocking. "There's just a huge amount of sugar covering the entire surface of these filaments in a way that has never been seen before," Egelman said. "These bugs have devised a way to just use massive amounts of sugar to cover these filaments and make them resistant to the incredible extremes of the environment in which they live."

[...] People can take a lesson from nature's design to manufacture products that are similarly sturdy, Egelman said. Take a protein such as wool, say, and coat it in a special arrangement of sugars and you could make amazingly durable clothing, carpet or even building materials. "Proteins are pretty sturdy and resilient, but with this type of covering of sugar, they would be much more stable, even more resilient," Egelman said. "They could have lots of uses."

An extensively glycosylated archaeal pilus survives extreme conditions (DOI: 10.1038/s41564-019-0458-x) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 01 2019, @02:57PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday July 01 2019, @02:57PM (#861960)

    Shellac, for extreme environments - organic diamond. Is it also flexible?

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 01 2019, @04:26PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 01 2019, @04:26PM (#862023) Journal

    Most things are flexible in thin enough layers. If it's surrounding pilli then it's probably about a single molecule thick, because pilli are used to absorb things from the environment and to manipulate it. So they've got to be flexible and small in comparison the the microbe that uses them.

    This raises the interesting question of "How do you get a thin enough coating on wool? ". You'd need to first separate it into individual fibers, then coat them, and then you'd need to recombine them.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 01 2019, @04:57PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday July 01 2019, @04:57PM (#862053)

      then you'd need to recombine them?

      Nanobots. Actually, a chemical process that does automatic highly parallelized assembly at nanoscale, like the bacteria use when they grow them.

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