Could 'Edible Optics' Save Your Life?

Aug. 14, 2008 — -- Silk from the humble silkworm has been used by humans for thousands of years, mostly to create textiles, but it appears that this remarkable material is on the verge of entering a dramatic new role. It may some day save your life.

Researchers at Tufts University and elsewhere are using silk to create sophisticated optics that may eventually warn that the spinach you were about to eat is contaminated with E. coli bacteria. Or the river you were about to plunge into is highly toxic. Or the glucose level in your blood is dangerously high.

There is a wide range of potential applications for this technology, if it can be scaled up to industrial production, and no one is more surprised than the scientists and engineers who are developing it.

"It was serendipitous," said Fiorenzo Omenetto, associate professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Tufts. "We didn't really set out with this in mind, to make optics out of silk."

Omenetto is an expert on more traditional optics, but when he arrived at Tufts he found himself in the company of David Kaplan, chairman of the biomedical engineering department, who is an expert on silk, among other things. The two have already created optical components, like lenses and sensors, out of protein from the silk that can be reformed into incredibly clear films.

The end product has unique properties, lending itself to surface texturing on the nano scale. It is compatible with biological materials and is so benign it can be programmed to self-destruct after its mission is completed, or just tossed on the ground "like giving the silkworm back to the grass," Omenetto said in a telephone interview.

And by the way, if that bag of spinach isn't contaminated, you can eat it, along with the sensor, with no problem. The researchers are calling it "edible optics."

"At a low cost, we could potentially put a bioactive silk film in every bag of spinach, and it could give the consumer a readout of whether or not E. coli bacteria were in the bag before the food was consumed," Kaplan said in announcing the research.