The world’s thinnest spaghetti is just 372 nm across — about 200 times thinner than a human hair.
“The novel nanopasta is not intended to be a new food but was created because of the wide-ranging uses that extremely thin strands of material, called nanofibers, have in medicine and industry,” said University College London researcher Beatrice Britton and her colleagues.
“Nanofibers made of starch are especially promising and could be used in bandages to aid wound healing, as scaffolding for bone regeneration and for drug delivery.”
“However, they rely on starch being extracted from plant cells and purified, a process requiring much energy and water.”
“A more environmentally friendly method is to create nanofibers directly from a starch-rich ingredient like flour, which is the basis for pasta.”
To create spaghetti just 372 nm across, the authors used a technique called electrospinning, in which threads of flour and liquid are pulled through the tip of a needle by an electric charge.
“To make spaghetti, you push a mixture of water and flour through metal holes,” said University College London researcher Adam Clancy.
“In our study, we did the same except we pulled our flour mixture through with an electrical charge. It’s literally spaghetti but much smaller.”
The novel nanopasta formed a mat of nanofibers about 2 cm across, and so is visible, but each individual strand is too narrow to be clearly captured by any form of visible light camera or microscope, so their widths were measured with a scanning electron microscope.
“Nanofibers, such as those made of starch, show potential for use in wound dressings as they are very porous,” said University College London’s Professor Gareth Williams.
“In addition, nanofibers are being explored for use as a scaffold to regrow tissue, as they mimic the extra-cellular matrix — a network of proteins and other molecules that cells build to support themselves.”
“Starch is a promising material to use as it is abundant and renewable — it is the second largest source of biomass on Earth, behind cellulose — and it is biodegradable, meaning it can be broken down in the body,” Dr. Clancy said.
“But purifying starch requires lots of processing. We’ve shown that a simpler way to make nanofibers using flour is possible.”
“The next step would be to investigate the properties of this product.”
“We would want to know, for instance, how quickly it disintegrates, how it interacts with cells, and if you could produce it at scale.”
In electrospinning, the needle in which the mixture is contained and the metal plate upon which the mixture is deposited form two ends of a battery.
Applying an electrical charge makes the mixture complete the circuit by streaming out of the needle on to the metal plate.
Electrospinning using a starch-rich ingredient such as white flour is more challenging than using pure starch, as the impurities — the protein and cellulose — make the mixture more viscous and unable to form fibers.
The researchers used flour and formic acid rather than water, as the formic acid breaks up the giant stacks of spirals (or helices) that make up starch.
This is because the layers of helices stuck together are too big to be the building blocks of nanofibers.
The formic acid then evaporates as the noodle flies through the air to the metal plate.
The scientists also had to carefully warm up the mixture for several hours before slowly cooling it back down to make sure it was the right consistency.
“As the newly developed material consists of fibers formed from the extrusion and drying of flour, it may be defined as pasta, dramatically undercutting the previous record for the thinnest pasta lunga by approximately a thousand times,” they concluded.
Their paper appears in the journal Nanoscale Advances.
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Beatrice Britton et al. Nanopasta: electrospinning nanofibers of white flour. Nanoscale Adv, published online October 30, 2024; doi: 10.1039/D4NA00601A
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