Hagfish slime could slink to the height of fashion

Move over organic cotton. Clothes made from hagfish slime could one day be the height of sustainable fashion.

Synthetic fabrics such as nylon and polyester are made from petroleum. A green, natural alternative would be a protein-based cloth made from spider silk - or the thick slime made by the hagfish (Myxine glutinosa) to help it escape predators. The slime contains myriad protein threads 100 times thinner than a human hair.

Douglas Fudge at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues previously isolated some of these threads and found them to be 10 times the strength of nylon. Now they have gone a step further, using forceps to draw a slender cord of protein fibres from a dried solution of hagfish slime (Biomacromolecules, doi.org/jwh).

The team will not need to rely on slime if they can genetically engineer bacteria to make the slime proteins. Efforts to produce spider silk proteins in this way have run into difficulties because it is hard for bacteria to make the large proteins in spider silk. Genetically modified goats can be made to secrete the proteins in milk, but using mammals rather than microbes significantly raises the cost.

The proteins in hagfish slime are several times smaller than those in spider silk, so it should be easier for bacteria to make them. The real pay-off would be if we could use bacterial hagfish proteins as a sustainable replacement for synthetic fibres, says Fudge, but the method will have to be improved before we can manufacture textiles in this way.

Christopher Holland of the Oxford Silk Group at the University of Oxford agrees. "If we can find better mechanisms to process natural materials into fibres, then either slime or spider silk could be our next generation of high-performance materials," he says.

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