Adding value to hoki skin
Marine collagen in hoki skin has particular properties that Plant & Food Research scientists can exploit for electrospinning.
Listen to this RNZ audio: Adding value to hoki skin to discover more.
Duration: 13:18
Collagen is a protein with many functions. It’s found in the skin, bone, tendons and around muscles. It has many roles, such as anchoring cells, cell communication, and storing and releasing proteins.
Finding new uses for fish skin
Hoki is New Zealand’s largest commercial fishery, with an annual quota of 120,000 tonnes. Once you take out all the fillets, there’s a lot of fish skin left over. About 40% of that ends up as byproducts such as skin, and scientists at Plant & Food Research in Nelson have been investigating ways of turning that low-value product into high-value goods.
Fish skin is high in collagen
Fish skin consists mainly of type I collagen – a rod-shaped molecule wrapped in a triple helix that has a structural role. Kathleen Hofman and Susan Marshall tell Alison Ballance about the particular properties of marine collagen and show her an electrospinning machine that turns collagen from fish skin into nanofibres that can be used, for example, as filters in home ventilation systems.
Innovations – Revolution Fibres
Blasting fish byproduct through a high-speed spinning machine with electrostatic propulsion sounds an unlikely answer to a domestic air filtration problem, but Auckland company Revolution Fibres is doing just that in its bid to transform the field of nanofibre production.
Where traditional electrospinning techniques require thousands of needles to produce a decent amount of fibre, Revolution Fibres’ Sonic Electrospinning Technology™ is an ingenious, needleless system capable of making fibre that is 5000 times thinner than human hair. The company is combining their invention with gifts from nature such as deep-water hoki and sauvignon blanc grapes.
One of the company’s first commercial products is an ultra-sensitive air filter for the home. The modest-sized filter holds 30 kilometres of nanofibre that’s spun from hoki collagen. Hoki collagen has unique properties because of the cold, deep water that the fish calls home. One kilo of the fish byproduct could make fibre that stretches all the way to the Sun.
As for sauvignon blanc grapes, the company is exploring the grapes’ high UV protection properties for use in its fibre mats. Revolution Fibres will soon have a commercial-scale loom with which they’ll be able to produce hundreds of square metres of nanofibre mat in a day. These mats will have multiple uses including wound repair, cosmetic care and skin protection.
Revolution Fibres have achieved all of this through much trial and error, and they figure that, once their nanofibre production is streamlined, they can literally make anything.
UPDATE: In May 2021, Revolution Fibres rebranded to NanoLayr.
Find out more
Find out more about nanotechnology.
Listen to this RNZ audio clip to find out more about how marine collagen in hoki skin has particular properties that can be exploited for electrospinning.
Find out more about producing commercial quantities of nanofibre.
Other uses of fish waste
You can listen to a previous Our Changing World interview New uses for marine by-products, with Susan Marshall and Matt Miller from Plant & Food Research's Natural Extracts team about other work to identify novel high-value uses for molecules found in fish waste, such as omega-3 and industrial enzymes.
Programme details: Our Changing World
