Bloodworms aren't for the faint-hearted. Don't be deceived, these marine tubes look harmless from a distance.
Bloodworms, also known as "bristle worms" or "Glycera", are a group of worms that burrow deep into the mud and emerge to grasp prey and competitors in their fearsome jaws that are partially composed of copper.
Scientists who study bloodworms don't speak highly of them.
Herbert Waite is a biochemist from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
When they encounter another worm, they use their copper jaws as weapons.
There is a bloodworm fang. Herbert Waite/CC BY-SA.
The bloodworm species Glycera dibranchiata has about 10 percent of its jaw made up of copper.
The combination of copper and melanin in bloodworm jaws gives the fangs considerable abrasion resistance, which helps the teeth last for up to five years.
In the new research, the team studied bloodworms, analyzed the jaw tissue, and identified a structuralProtein that helps these different chemical components come together so successfully.
The researchers suggest that the multi-tasking protein is so effective that it could help point the way to new material-manufacturing processes.
We didn't expect the simple composition of the protein to perform this many functions and unrelated activities.
These materials could be road signs for how to make and engineer better consumer materials.
The end-to-end jaw production process involves numerous chemical roles performed by MTP.
These include binding copper, catalyzing melanin formation, and acting as an organizer and fabricator, assembling the resulting blend of protein, copper, and melanin that make up the jaws in the bloodworm's proboscis.
It is a formidable trick, the researchers say, and one which would take a lot of work and different equipment to replicate in a laboratory setting.
It could be a big step forward in materials science if we can figure out how to replicate it.
The researchers write in their paper that the concerted activities of MTP in the construction of Glycera jaw architecture present a compelling opportunity to rethink the design of processing technologies needed for high-performance and sustainable composite and blended polymeric materials.
The combination of chemical simplicity and functional flexibility in MTP holds tremendous potential for bio-inspired and natural materials processing.
It is amazing to think that all this ingenuity came from the mouth of a bloodworm. Maybe they are not so bad after all.
The worm makes a jaw that is as hard and stiff as bronze, and some ceramics as well.
The findings are reported.
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