The world's thinnest pasta is born! Researchers say: It's inedible

Compiled by: Gong Zixin

The world's thinnest pasta is born!

The research team, led by University College London

Create this pasta

Not for eating

It is because of its extremely fine nanofiber material

Can be widely used in medical and industrial fields

In a new paper in the journal Nanoscale Progress, the team describes using a technique called electrospinning to make spaghetti just 372 nanometers (billionths of a meter) wide. The research was done by Beatrice Britto while she was doing her masters in chemistry at University College London.

Co-author Professor Gareth Williams of the UCL School of Pharmacy points out that nanofibers made from starch can be used in bandages to help wounds heal (because the nanofiber mat is highly porous, allowing water and moisture to enter but keeping bacteria out), as well as mimicking the extracellular matrix, which can be used as a scaffold for bone regeneration and drug delivery. However, such nanofibers rely on starch being extracted and purified from plant cells, a process that requires a lot of energy and water.

A more environmentally friendly approach, the researchers say, would be to create nanofibers directly from starch-rich ingredients such as flour.

Co-author Dr Adam Clancy, from UCL's Department of Chemistry, said: "To make pasta, you push a mixture of water and flour through holes in a metal. In our study we did the same thing, except we used an electrical charge to pull the flour mixture through. The result is effectively pasta, but much finer."

In the paper, the researchers describe the second-thinnest known pasta, called su filindeu ("God's thread"), which is handmade by pasta makers in the town of Nuoro, Sardinia. The long noodles are estimated to be about 400 microns wide, 1,000 times thicker than the new electrospun products, which are only 372 nanometers, narrower than some wavelengths of light. To put that in perspective, a human hair is usually 60-90 microns in diameter, which means that this electrospun thread is 200 times thinner than a human hair.

The new 'nanobatter' formed a mat of nanofibres about 2 centimetres in diameter and was therefore visible, but the individual nanofibres were too narrow to be clearly captured by any form of visible light camera or microscope, so their widths were measured using a scanning electron microscope.

Dr Clancy said: “Starch is a promising material because it is abundant and renewable – it is the second largest source of biomass on Earth after cellulose – and it is biodegradable, meaning it can be broken down in the body.

"But purifying starch requires a lot of processing. We have shown that a simpler way of making nanofibers from flour is possible, and the next step will be to investigate the properties of this product. For example, we want to know how quickly it breaks down, how it interacts with cells, and whether it can be produced on a large scale." In electrospinning, the needles containing the mixture and the metal plate on which the mixture is deposited form the two ends of the battery. Applying an electric charge causes the mixture to complete the circuit by flowing from the needle to the metal plate.

Electrospinning with starch-rich feedstocks such as white flour is more challenging than using pure starch because impurities — proteins and cellulose — make the mixture more viscous and unable to form fibers.

The researchers used flour and formic acid, rather than water, because layers of helices that stick together are too large to form the building blocks of nanofibers, and formic acid would break up the bulk of the helices that make up starch. (Cooking does the same thing to starch as formic acid does to it—it breaks up the helical layers of noodles, making them more digestible.) The formic acid evaporates as the noodles fly through the air onto the metal plate. The researchers also had to carefully heat the mixture for several hours and then slowly cool it to make sure it was the right consistency.

The researchers noted:

Unfortunately

This pasta is not suitable for consumption

Because when you put the noodles in the pot

It will be overcooked in less than a second.