ChEMS Seminar: Hagfish Slime Unraveled

 

Abstract: Hagfishes are an ancient group of bottom dwelling marine animals that are best known for their ability to very quickly produce large volumes of gill-clogging slime when they are attacked by predators. In this talk, I will present answers to several questions about hagfish slime including: How do hagfishes make so much slime? How is the slime deployed into seawater and how does it set up so quickly? How do specialized cells within the slime glands each produce a 15 cm long silk-like fibre in their cytoplasm? Lastly, I will discuss our biomimetic efforts to produce novel materials inspired by hagfish slime, and briefly touch on other projects that have been inspired by studying hagfishes.

 

Bio: Douglas S. Fudge runs the Comparative Biomaterials Lab at the University of Guelph. As an undergraduate, he studied biology at Cornell University, followed by an M.A.T. in science education, also at Cornell. For his M.Sc. research, he worked on the biology of bluefin tuna at the University of Guelph, and then moved to the University of British Columbia for his Ph.D., where he worked on the biomechanics of hagfish slime in John Gosline’s lab. As an NSERC postdoctoral fellow, he worked on cell biomechanics in Wayne Vogl’s lab in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. He joined the faculty in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph in 2005.