Articles
Scientists
Finally Copy Creator’s
Super-Rubber
Jonathan Sarfati
The stretchiest rubber in the world, resilin, comes from insects.
It is responsible for the super-jumping abilities of fleas and
the deafening chirps of cicadas, and also has an important role
in insect wings. In fact, it was first found in dragonfly wings
about 40 years ago. Resilin must also be stable enough to last
an insect’s lifetime, because the adult insect does not manufacure
it.
A team led by
Chris Elvin, a molecular biologist at CSIRO Livestock Industries
in Queensland, Australia, has finally reproduced this
super-rubber. But they had to copy the Manufacturer’s instructions.
The resilin gene had been found within the fruit fly genome in 2001,
so they copied the gene into common gut bacteria, Escherichia coli.
Then the bacteria were made to follow the instructions to produce
the raw protein.
But this is
not enough—the protein chains must be linked together
in very specific ways to produce the super-rubber. So insects require
not only the instructions for the protein, but also instructions
for processing the proteins. Instead, Elvin’s team used bright
light with a ruthenium metal catalyst to make the proteins link in
the right way.
This artificial
resilin was as good as the natural insect rubber. It was ‘almost perfectly elastic’, with only 3% of the
energy stored in stretching lost as heat when the resilin contracts.
Even polybutadiene ‘superballs’ lose 20% of their energy
with each bounce. And resilin can ‘stretch to three times its
unstressed length without breaking’.
Sources
Nature 437, pp. 999–1002, 13 October 2005.
Science now, http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/1012/1
As the second article on this super-rubber put it, “The living
world puts human engineering to shame.” Hardly surprising,
since its Engineer’s ways are as high above ours as Heaven
is above Earth (Isaiah 55:8–9).
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4252/
Used by permission of Creation Ministries International: www.creationontheweb.com
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