Chemists have created the world's thinnest spaghetti - and it's not about food

A team of researchers from University College London (UCL) has created the world's thinnest 'spaghetti', which is about 200 times thinner than a human hair. But before you decide to try it for lunch, it's worth noting: this is not a new gastronomic dish, but a scientific breakthrough with a wide range of medical and industrial applications.

Nanospaghetti: what is it?

This ultra-thin "spaghetti" is nanofibres made of starch, a substance that many green plants produce to store excess glucose. Nanofibres, or nanofibres, have unique properties and can be used in the creation of dressings to accelerate wound healing, as a framework for bone regeneration and for drug delivery. They are highly porous, allowing water and moisture to pass through but preventing bacteria from entering.

How were they created?

Traditionally, nanofibres are made from purified starch, which requires significant energy and water input. Scientists decided to take a different route and create nanofibres directly from a starch-rich ingredient - ordinary flour, which serves as a paste base.

Using the electrospinning method, they passed a mixture of flour and liquid through a needle under the influence of an electric charge. In this way, they were able to produce "spaghetti" just 372 nanometres thick - thinner than some wavelengths of visible light!

Comparison with traditional pasta

By comparison, the thinnest type of traditional paste - "su filindeu" (Sardinian for "God's threads") - is handmade and is about 400 microns thick. That's 1,000 times thicker than the nanospaghetti that has been created.

Perspectives and a bit of humour

Professor Gareth Williams of UCL noted:

Unfortunately you can't use this as a paste - it will digest in less than a second, you won't have time to take it out of the pan. However, from a scientific point of view, the discovery is hugely significant.

The future of nanospaghetti

The next step for scientists is to study the properties of the resulting nanofibres in more detail: how quickly they degrade, how they interact with cells and whether mass production is possible. Dr Adam Clancy adds that starch is a promising material because it is abundant, renewable and biodegradable.

For details of the research, see Beatrice Britton et al, Nanopasta: electrospinning nanofibers of white flour, Nanoscale Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1039/D4NA00601A