A venomous snake has inspired the progress of an artificial skin capable of sensing heat, a trait found in the pit viper species of snakes impelled scientists to create a new kind of material that could be used as a skin graft on prosthetics to restore sensing abilities of amputees.
Professor Raffaele Di Giacomo from the Swiss university ETH Zurich, is one of the scientists behind this new development and he says that the skin could also be put to first-aid bandages to alert health professionals to temperature spikes and development of infections in wounds.
This synthetic skin, which is almost paper-thin, is made from jellified pectin, a natural substance found in berries, apples and other fruits and then enriched with calcium ions molecules with an electrical charge.
It senses temperature using a method similar - but not identical - to the pit organ in vipers, located between the eye and the nostril on either side of their heads, which enables the snakes to sense warm prey in the dark by detecting radiated heat.
In the pit organ, unique to this type of viper snake, ion channels within the sensory nerve fibers expand as temperature increases. This dilation allows calcium ions to flow, triggering electrical impulses.
A research paper about the synthetic skins, published in Science Robotics, says they accurately detected "tiny" temperature changes within a range of 10 to 55 degrees Celsius.
Critically, the structures of the synthetic skin maintained stability and high sensitivity even after physical deformation, such as bending or twisting, a highly desirable characteristic for artificial skin.
While still in the very early stages of development, using the artificial skin for biomedical applications would be easy and economical, Pectin is widely used in the food industry as a jellifying agent; it's what you use to make jam. So it's easy to obtain and also very cheap, said Dr Chiara Dario, a professor at Caltech.
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