A team of UK chemists at the University College London (UCL), have created the world’s thinnest spaghetti, believed to be 200 times thinner than a human hair and narrower than some wavelengths of light. The study, published in Nanoscale Advances, states that the new brand of pasta smashed the previous record for the thinnest pasta lunga by approximately a thousand times. Since each individual strand was too narrow to be clearly captured by any form of visible light camera or microscope, the researchers used a “scanning electron microscope, scanning the mat with a focused beam of electrons and creating an image based on the pattern of electrons that are deflected”.

The ‘near-invisible’ pasta is not intended to be a new food as it will overcook in under a second. It has been created because extremely fine strands in it, called nanofibres, could have significant medical uses.

The team achieved the desired result by using a technique called ‘electrospinning’ to create the nanofibres, with diameters of 372 nanometres (billionths of a metre), from a flour mixture. They used flour and formic acid rather than water as the formic acid breaks up the helices (giant stacks of spirals) that make up starch.

Additionally, they had to warm up the mixture for several hours before slowly cooling it back down to make sure it was the right consistency.

“To make spaghetti, you push a mixture of water and flour through metal holes. In our study, we did the same except we pulled our flour mixture through with an electrical charge. It’s literally spaghetti but much smaller,” said co-author Dr. Adam Clancy.

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Uses of nanofibres

The formed nanofibres are hydrophilic, and can be used as a cheaper, greener replacement for starch in biodegradable, biosourced nanofiber applications, such as next-generation bandaging, or carbonised supercapacitor electrodes.

“Nanofibers, such as those made of starch, show potential for use in wound dressings as they are very porous. In addition, nanofibers are being explored for use as a scaffold to regrow tissue, as they mimic the extra-cellular matrix – a network of proteins and other molecules that cells build to support themselves,” said co-author Professor Gareth Williams.