A team of researchers from Washington State University have discovered a way of teaching microbes to make muscle fibres – a substance stronger than silk or cotton, and which the team hopes could provide a novel alternative to typical polymers. These man-made iterations are usually non-biodegradable and petroleum based – requiring high amounts of energy to be made.
Their paper on the matter was published in Nature Communications on Monday this week (30 August).
The team previously managed to stimulate bacteria to make super strength spider silk, using a method they repurposed in this project to make muscle fibres. According to the team, the resulting fibres can be used in everything from biomedicine to textiles.
While typically muscle fibres would have to be harvested from animals, the Washington State team made synthetic versions using microbes. The protein made by these microbes is a polymer called titin – a natural protein component of muscles that has a high damping capacity and mechanical recovery. The team’s version also exhibited high strength and durability, which they said ‘outperform[s] many synthetic and natural polymers.’
Titin has previously been identified as a potentially useful material, however the team says due to its ‘massive size and repetitive sequence’, it has typically proven difficult to reproduce as a polymer base. To overcome this problem, the team at Washington created small segments of the fibre which they engineered the bacteria to piece together – creating a polymer around 50 times the size of an average bacterial protein that is tougher than Kevlar.
As well as clothing or even protective equipment applications, the fibre has potential biomedical uses due to its structural similarity to proteins in muscle tissue, making it a viable material for sutures and tissue engineering.
“The beauty of the system is that it’s really a platform that can be applied anywhere,” said Cameron Sargent, first author on the paper. “We can take proteins from different natural contexts, then put them into this platform for polymerization and create larger, longer proteins for various material applications with a greater sustainability.”
The team conducted their work alongside collaborators Young Shin Jun, professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, and Sinan Keten, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University.
Reference:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/materials/would-you-wear-clothes-made-from-muscle-fibres/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25360-6
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-synthetic-biology-enables-microbes-muscle.html
