The material is extremely strong, sustainable, and biodegradable.
It lies in a unique structure containing an amalgamation of flexible tightly packed fibers of a scaffold material called chitin, interspersed with fine crystals of an iron-containing mineral called goethite. Those fibers are laced through each other in much the same way as carbon fibers can be used to strengthen plastic.To grow them outside of their natural environment, researchers developed methods where they deposited chitin and iron oxide, just as in the limpet tooth, on serum-coated glass.
"I spent six months setting up this process. I went through every kind of permutation I could think of for what the cells might need and how they’d grow. It’s very different to growing bacteria or cancer cells which commonly grow in a lab environment, so we had to work out from scratch what would work," said Rumney.'Replacing the use of plastics with a biological substitute'
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