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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)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @07:03PM
Alec Guinness had been a stalwart communist party member back in those days, so the plot of the movie is showing how Capitalism can ruin even the most altruistic of motives all for the great profit. Particularly ironic since Mr. Guinness' acting career was then destroyed by the McCarthy communist hunt a decade or so later when he was a resident(citizen?) of the United States. Guinness didn't have another major part in a movie until cast for Star Wars took place, at which time he realized how big the movie would be with fans, unlike any of his acting brethren, and made sure to negotiate a percentage as part of his contract. Said percentage ended up supporting him and his wife up until their respective deaths many years later (as far as I know, they had no children.)