Researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a new approach to produce synthetic protein which can then be used to make clothing. Microbes were modified to produce the high molecular weight muscle protein, titin, which was then spun into fibers.
According to the researchers, the synthetic protein is “cheap and scalable. It may enable many applications that people had previously thought about, but with natural muscle fibers.” The new synthetic protein could be particularly attractive to vegans, because it requires no actual animal tissues to produce.
Synthetic Protein: A New Frontier in Clothing – and Beyond?
The synthetic protein produced in the experiment lab is titin, which is one of the three major protein components of muscle tissue. One of the most important characteristics is its heavy molecular weight. In fact, titin is the “largest known protein in nature”.
Researchers have been interested in developing materials that resemble muscle fibers for some time, for use in applications like soft robotics.
“We wondered, ‘Why don’t we just directly make synthetic muscles?'” Fuzhong Zhang, one of the principal researchers, said. “But we’re not going to harvest them from animals, we’ll use microbes to do it.”
To get around some of the issues that typically prevent bacteria from producing large proteins like titin, the research team genetically engineered bacteria to piece together smaller segments of protein into heavier polymers.
The researchers then used a wet-spinning process to convert the proteins into fibers that were around a tenth the thickness of human hair.
The group then analyzed the structure of these fibers to identify the molecular mechanisms that enable them to display their exceptional toughness, strength, and damping capacity (i.e. the ability to dissipate mechanical energy as heat).
The material produced is tougher than the kevlar used in bulletproof vests, but could have applications well beyond self-protection. It could even have biomedical applications, since it is more or less identical to the protein found in human muscle fibres. The material could be used to make sutures or for tissue engineering.
The research team have already filed a patent application based on the research.
“The beauty of the system is that it’s really a platform that can be applied anywhere,” said one of the researchers. “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.”
Yesterday, we reported on another amazing discovery. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discovered that dileucine, a branched-chain amino acid, can increase muscle growth by 42%.
This is a significant boost that compares favourably with the protein-building boost that comes from exercise.
“To put that in perspective, exercise alone can cause a 100-150% increase in the muscle-building response,” one of the principal researchers said.
Start-up Ingenious Ingredients has already filed a patent for dileucine as a supplement, with further American and international patents pending.
While the primary market for dileucine supplements might appear to be young men interested in building muscle, Ingenious Ingredients plants to target other demographics that might be in need of a muscle-building boost, such as the elderly and ‘populations that have an overall negative nitrogen balance, meaning they are losing muscle mass, eg. during calorie restriction, during immobilization or hospitalization (muscle disuse atrophy),” according to Ingenious founder Dr Ralf Jaeger.
Stay tuned to Herculean Strength to learn more about the frontiers of health and fitness science.
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