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Martin Schwalbe
Friday, August 14, 2009
Shoals Marine Lab researchers look to hagfish for 'biosteel'
By Jim Kozubek, Special to Mass High Tech
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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.
Hagfish secrete 10-nanometer “intermediate filaments,’ which are like unique, nanoscale ‘rubber bands’ that can stand 200 percent strains before failing. “It raises the possibility that these filaments are virtually unbreakable at the kinds of strain normally encountered by cells and may function to stave off catastrophic mechanical failure of a tissue,” he said.
It makes them a good candidate for high-performance fiber threads that could build materials that rival Kevlar for ballistics protection.
“Ultimately, we envision making protein-based materials that could replace more conventional polymers like polyester and nylon,” Fudge said.
Nexia Biotechnologies Ltd. of Canada in 2002 produced a spider-silk protein by implanting spider genes into recombinant goat DNA. The transgenic goats amplified the gene into proteins that were extracted from the goat’s milk and electrospun into threads of what Nexia called “biosteel.” Last month, Nexia announced that it had entered into an agreement to sell its assets and license its technology to Canada’s national food and materials lab, Advanced Foods and Materials Network.
Gareth McKinley, a mechanical engineer at MIT, and a collaborator of the Guelph team, said investors have since purchased Nexia’s remaining assets: “a herd of goats.” Nexia failed to bring the material to market due to challenges in “materials processing,” he said.
Andy Shedlock, a staff scientist at Harvard University, said hagfish filaments contain much of their strength due to the character of their filament genes, which are simpler, about 180 kilobases, enabling them to be inserted into a “bacteria artificial chromosome.”
Shoals Marine Lab is open 20 weeks a year and has a budget of $1.7 million. It leases land from the Star Island Corp., and receives funding through Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire.
Jim Kozubek is a freelance writer in Portsmouth, N.H.
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