Anyone who has tried making pasta at home will understand the skill and patience it takes to achieve the perfect thickness.
So think about this group of scientists who created the world’s thinnest spaghetti.
A team from University College London (UCL) has created strands that are about 200 times thinner than a human hair.
In fact, they are so slim that they cannot even be seen under a microscope!
But instead of using the spaghetti for eating, it will be used in medical research, they said.
The experts said their achievement is not intended as a new food, but came about because of the diverse applications that extremely thin strands of material called nanofibers have in medicine.
Nanofibers made from starch – produced by most green plants to store excess glucose – are particularly promising and could be used in bandages to promote wound healing.
This is because nanofiber mats are very porous, allowing water and moisture to enter, but keeping bacteria out.
A team from University College London (UCL) has made the strands so thin that they cannot even be seen under a microscope
Anyone who has tried making pasta at home will understand the skill and patience it takes to achieve the perfect thickness
They can also be used as a scaffold for bone regeneration and for delivering drugs to parts of the body.
However, they rely on starch being extracted and purified from plant cells – a process that requires a lot of energy and water.
A more environmentally friendly method, the researchers say, is to make nanofibers directly from a starchy ingredient such as flour, which is the basis for pasta.
In a new paper, the team describes making spaghetti with a diameter of just 372 nanometers (one billionth of a meter) using a technique called electrospinning, in which threads of flour and liquid are passed through an electric charge through the tip of a needle is pulled.
Co-author Dr Adam Clancy said: ‘To make spaghetti, you push a mixture of water and flour through metal holes.
‘In our research we did the same thing, except we pulled our flour mixture through it electrically.
“It’s literally spaghetti, but much smaller.”
The new ‘nanopaste’ formed a mat of nanofibers about 2cm across, so is visible, but each individual strand is too narrow to be clearly captured by any form of visible light camera or microscope, so their width was measured with a scanning electron microscope.
The new ‘nanopaste’ formed a mat of nanofibers about 2cm across, so is visible, but each individual strand is too narrow to be clearly captured by any form of visible light camera or microscope, so their width was measured with a scanning electron microscope
The next thinnest known pasta, called ‘su filindeu’ – ‘threads of God’ – is made by hand by a pasta maker in Sardinia.
That paste is estimated to be about 400 microns wide – 1,000 times thicker than the new creation.
Co-author Professor Gareth WIlliams said: ‘Unfortunately I don’t think it is useful as a pasta as it would be overcooked in a second before you could remove it from the pan.’
Their work was published in the journal Nanoscale Advances.