Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
Scientists have made the world’s thinnest spaghetti, spinning white flour into fibres less than a thousandth of a millimetre thick.
While delicate, the spaghetti is probably not good eating.
“I don’t think it’s useful as pasta, sadly, as it would overcook in less than a second, before you could take it out of the pan,” says Professor Gareth Williams, a researcher at University College London, UK.
Instead, according to the chemist chefs who cooked it up, the “nanopasta” could be a valuable medical material in things like bandages, bone scaffolds, and drug delivery patches.
“Nanofibers, such as those made of starch, show potential for use in wound dressings as they are very porous,” says Williams, who is co-author on a paper describing the spaghetti, published in Nanoscale Advances.
“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.”
The researchers were investigating white flour as a potential source of starch for nanofibers.
“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,” says co-author Dr Adam Clancy, a chemist at University College London.
“But purifying starch requires lots of processing. We’ve shown that a simpler way to make nanofibers using flour is possible.”
The simpler method is “electrospinning”, with white flour and warm formic acid.
“To make spaghetti, you push a mixture of water and flour through metal holes,” says 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.”
Formic acid helps to break up the chunks of starch polymers in the flour, allowing them to spin out in fine fibres. The acid evaporates as the mixture zooms through the tiny pores, leaving pure starch.
The resulting nanopasta is 372 nanometres thick, or about the same size as a measles virus.
This makes it more than 2,000 times thinner than angel hair pasta (which is 0.8mm thick), the narrowest mass-produced pasta.
“The next step would be to investigate the properties of this product,” says Clancy.
“We would want to know, for instance, how quickly it disintegrates, how it interacts with cells, and if you could produce it at scale.”
