Taitin
The future of our world belongs to biotechnologies, and scientists from Washington University in St. Louis (USA) have presented another strong proof of this. They trained bacteria to collect artificial analogues of living muscles, but not in the form of ready-made muscles, but in the format of fibers. They can be used to weave fabric or create details of prostheses, the strength of which exceeds all current analogues.
The success of scientists in creating new materials is inspiring, but nature had 4 billion years at its disposal, so its creations are much better. In this case, we are talking about titin, the largest of the proteins in the composition of natural muscles. It is very elastic and at the same time durable, it works like a spring. Scientists can create a synthetic analogue of it, but because of the size of the titin, it was previously time-consuming and unprofitable. The achievement of American scientists is that they have developed a technology for producing large and wide fibers from taitin. To do this, the modified bacteria first assemble the structure of a large protein from the fragments. Then, using wet spinning, the protein is converted into fibers with a width of 10 microns. Being woven into a thread, and then into a fabric, such synthetic muscles perfectly dissipate mechanical energy, converting it into heat. The first experiments have already shown that the strength of synthetic taitin fibers is higher than that of Kevlar, while they are very flexible. Since it is a biological material, it is compatible with human tissues and can be used directly during operations. And the scientists also promised to make the technology of obtaining taitin fibers cheap and scalable, which will allow creating a variety of prostheses and implants that increase the capabilities of the human body.