Ep 44: The Science of Slime

<p>What’s the slimiest fish on Earth? <em>Why </em>are they so slimy? And can we leverage our understanding of slime to make better bioengineered materials?</p> <p>In this episode we talk with Doug Fudge, an Associate Professor at Chapman University, about his research on hagfish slime. Over the past 20 years, Doug and his lab and collaborators have figured out how and why hagfish produce slime, how the slime’s remarkable properties emerge from its underlying chemistry, and whether the protein threads in slime can be used to make bio-inspired fabrics that are greener, better, and longer lasting.</p> <p>A significant portion of Doug’s work has been published in <em>Journal of Experimental Biology</em>, including <a href="https://jeb.biologists.org/content/208/24/4613.short" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">this 2005 paper</a> on the composition and structure of hagfish slime and <a href="https://jeb.biologists.org/content/209/4/702.short" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">this 2006 paper</a> testing a key hypothesis about how hagfish use slime to defend themselves from predators. Fudge’s lab published recent papers on <a href="https://jeb.biologists.org/content/221/7/jeb172254" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">how slime glands refill </a>after they eject their slimy contents and <a href="https://jeb.biologists.org/content/222/22/jeb213793.abstract" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">how they chemically stabilize coiled threads</a> inside the glands before they are ejected. Papers in other journals explore how <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3182/5/3/035002/meta" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">slime threads can be used to make bio-inspired fabrics</a> and <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4534" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">how slime threads are constructed and mature</a> inside slime glands.</p> --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bigbiology/message