Veronique Greenwood in Harvard Magazine:
One story David Mooney tells starts with a slug. “This slug does a really good job of creating a mucus that allows it to stick really tightly, so predators can’t just peel it off and eat it,” he says. The mucus, a marvelous material, turns out to consist of a springy mesh made of sugars and proteins threaded through each other. When pushed with a finger, the energy disperses through the mesh, rather than tearing it, indicating serious toughness. There’s plenty of water in there, too, Mooney points out. That’s handy, because if you want a substance to stick to your inner organs, it’s more convenient if you know it can withstand the damp.
Mooney is not a slug biologist. He is in fact the Pinkas Family professor of bioengineering, a founding faculty member of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the holder of numerous patents on subjects ranging from recipes for cancer vaccines to ways to guide drugs through the body (see “Fighting Disease in Situ,” May-June 2009, page 10, and “Biological Vaccine Factories,” January-February 2021, page 9). But he is a strong proponent of observation. One researcher in his lab realized that the slug mucus strongly resembled material another group member had been exploring some years before.
More here.
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