Portsmouth based scientists and engineers develop limpet inspired biomaterial with extreme strength that can potentially replace some plastics

The team from the University of Portsmouth have successfully mimicked a limpet tooth formation, using it to make a new composite material.

Limpets are small aquatic snail-like molluscs which scrape food off rocks using microscopic teeth.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, suggests it has the potential to be upscaled into a more environmentally material.

It can be disposed of without generating harmful waste products.

Dr Robin Rumney, lead author from the University’s School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, said: ‘Fully synthetic composites like Kevlar are widely used, but the manufacturing processes can be toxic, the materials difficult and expensive to recycle.

‘Here we have a material which potentially is much more sustainable in terms of how it’s sourced and made, and at the end of its life can be biodegraded.’

The reason why the research was inspired by limpet teeth is due to its unique structure.

It contains a combination of flexible tightly packed fibres of a scaffold material called chitin.

These are interspersed with fine crystals of an iron containing mineral called goethite.

Those fibres are laced through each other in much the same way as carbon fibres can be used to strengthen plastic.

Researchers developed methods which allowed cell populations on serum-coated glass.

The cells deposit chitin and iron oxide just as in the limpet tooth.

After two weeks, they self-organised into structures that resembled the limpet organ, known as the radula, which makes the teeth.

Dr Rumney found ways of growing ribbons of teeth from tissue samples and individual teeth from populations containing stem cells.

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Samples of biomaterial, half a cm wide, were then produced.

Scientists want to explore the possibility that this can be mass manufactured, replacing plastics with a biological substitute.

‘Our next step is to find other ways of getting the iron formation occurring, so we’re studying the secretions of the limpet cells to better understand that’, Dr Rumney said.

‘If it works really well, then we already have the gene readouts of the organ so we can lift the genes of interest out, and hopefully put them into bacteria or yeast to grow them at scale.’