|
In our weaving chitosan fibers video, we spent a lot of time extracting chitin from shellfish shells to produce a mildly disgusting goop. Chitin and chitosan are incredibly interesting structural proteins as the animal world’s cellulose. We’ve already explored chitin in past videos and we’ll definitely be returning to the chitosan spinning and hopefully incorporate sky cooling capabilities. First, we’ve got to fix up our spinning machine. Running it for this video and the milk silk [link] videos definitely took its toll on some of the components and revealed some key deficiencies for our intended uses.
Many watching our video commented asking whether people with shellfish or seafood allergies could wear such clothing. After all this allergy accounts for about 2% of the American population and in many cases exposure can have lethal consequences. It’s a valid concern and so we’ve looked into it and with proper extraction and isolation of chitosan from waste shell products it shouldn’t cause any allergic reactions. Essentially, chitin and chitosan are not the allergens responsible for the violent reactions experienced by those who suffer from the allergies, if it was the symptoms would be exhibited with exposure to most insects and arachnids.
But what exactly are people allergic to in seafood? Well sea bugs are chock-full of interesting proteins and the allergens are mostly found in the flesh and muscle cells. There are 8 known allergens but only the 3 primary ones are available for IgE recombinant diagnosis testing. These are tropomyosin, arginine kinase, and sarcoplasmic Ca2+-binding protein, while the remaining are the myosin light chain, troponin C, triosephosphate isomerase, and actin.
Many of these proteins are components of the sarcomere, the smallest functional unit of a striated muscle, of which there are two types cardiac and skeletal. Crustaceans obviously don’t have endoskeletons as mammals do but rather an exoskeleton, their powerful limbs and tails are powered by such striated muscles.
So tropomyosin is a double stranded alpha-helical coiled coil structural protein in muscular cells and it forms part of the cytoskeleton with filamentous Actin (F-Actin) and Troponin which form the long microfilaments of the muscular fibers. Myosin light chains in conjunction to their heavy chain counterparts form functional motor proteins, which attach to the actin group and contract the muscle. Sarcoplasmic Ca2+-binding protein are buffer proteins usually found in the longitudinal sarcoplasmic reticulum of fast twitching muscles, they help in the regulation of the Ca2+ ions during the muscular contractions. Muscles are tiny micro linear actuators and this minute motion culminates in full limb movements, these structures are inherently interesting and we hope that in the near future we’ll be able to look more closely into functional muscular tissue cultures.
|
