You may have heard of su filindeu -– the most-recognized rarest pasta in the world, believed to have been created in the village of Lula on the island of Sardinia, Italy. It has been made for over 300 years, and is so fine that it is known as the threads of God. Su filindeu is about half the width of angel hair pasta. And if you take it into nanometers, a strand of su filindeu is about 440,000 nanometers in diameter. But an even smaller pasta has been developed by scientists, and this one you can’t even see with the naked eye.
Called nanospaghetti, this wispy pasta is 372 nanometers wide –- take a single human hair, then make it 200 times thinner, and that’s a strand of nanospaghetti. So measured up against su filindieu, it’s 1,000 times smaller. It is so tiny that it can only be seen with very particular equipment, like a scanning electron microscope.
Incidentally, nanospaghetti wasn’t actually developed as a type of food. A team of chemists at University College London (UCL), UK, were conducting an experiment as part of the research in master’s students Beatrice Britton and Dr. Adam Clancy’s studies, to create nanofibers. Through the experiment, they realized that this nanospaghetti could actually be an incredibly important discovery for the healthcare sector, in the healing of wounds, bone regeneration, and the delivery of medications to the body.
Making pasta with electricity
Nanospaghetti is made from a natural starch mixture which is porous enough for water to get through but not bacteria. And because it is natural, it is biodegradable, which means that the body can break it down. The nanofibers also resemble the structure of the extracellular matrix, which is the structure that enables molecules to support cells and tissues in the body. The researchers were also excited by this development because this type of starch –- white flour –- is abundant and easily obtained, as well as being renewable, so getting the ingredients for nanospaghetti is a cinch.
Nanospaghetti is made in much the same way as standard spaghetti, but on a microscopic scale. While your table spaghetti is made from a flour and water mixture, with human force pushing the dough (known as dope) through metal holes to create the shape, nanospaghetti is made from a mixture of flour and formic acid and pushed through a hollow needle using an electric current. The process, called electrospinning, sees formic acid breaking down the helical structures that make up the starch as the mixture moves from the needle to a metal plate a short distance away. In that short space of time, the nanospaghetti dries with many strands knitting together to form little mats of nanofibers on the metal plate, collectively looking somewhat like thin tracing paper.
The ideal outcome is to position the nanospaghetti as a greener, more affordable replacement for starch that can become the next best thing in wound care and bandaging.
