Scientists Create Polymer Nanosuits that Protect Insects Inside Vacuum

A nanosuit created by scientist Takahiko Hariyama at the Hamamatsu University School of Medicine in Japan allows insects to survive in a vacuum.

In order to have a closer look at something, you have to view it using a scanning electron microscope, and this works only in vacuum. Living creatures die during this process because of the loss of water from their body. Such conditions lead to the death of the organism due to physical distortion or depression. This made it difficult for the scientists to view important biological functions of a specimen when it was alive. But the new nanosuit takes care of this obstacle.

The new approach was based on the team's previous finding which states that few specimens such as beetle larvae and ticks manage to survive for a short duration under low environment pressure. Under the new approach, scientists have coated the insect's larvae with Tween-20, which is a common detergent. This allowed them to survive the powerful vacuum. Hariyama came up with this idea after noticing that fruit fly larvae have a special kind of molecule in their cuticles that form a protective layer just 50-100 nanometers thick when exposed to electrons or ionized gas.

Researchers also tested their hypothesis by applying artificial coating on organisms such as flatworm and Asian tiger mosquito. The coating formed a similar effective nanosuit under plasma irradiation.

"The technique could change the way in which some living organisms could be studied using present-day electron microscopes," Harry Horner, a developmental biologist at Iowa State University in Ames, was quoted as saying in Latino Post. "Not only with organisms that exist on Earth, but with organisms sent into space or retrieved from space explorations."

The study details have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.