China News Service, August 23. According to Taiwan's "Central News Agency", the Taiwan Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University team used the spider silk spun by the human-faced spider to develop an optical fiber sugar content sensor that can effectively measure sugar content within one ten thousandth of a second (0.1ms) and is used to measure the sugar concentration in human blood to help diabetes management.
The picture shows the production process of spider silk optical fiber. Image source: Taiwan Yang-Ming Jiaotong University
According to reports, Taiwan-Yang-Ming Jiaotong University issued a press release on the 23rd. A team composed of professor Liu Chengyang of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and master's degree E Xuanbei developed an optical fiber sugar sensor using spider silk as a material. The research results were published in the international biomedical optical journal Biomedical Optics Express in September and was selected as an editor's pick.
reported that what Liu Chengyang and others value is that spider silk has good ductility, light wave transmission and other physical properties, and is different from optical fiber made of glass and plastic. Spider silk also has a high degree of biocompatibility and is quite suitable for use on the human body. The R&D team tried different species of spiders and even captured spiders in the school for experiments. Unfortunately, the quality of spider silk was not very stable. After many attempts, the human-faced spider was selected as the main silk source. After the
team obtained natural spider silk from living spiders, they first used light to solidify resin to stabilize the structure, and then used oblique film sputtering technology to sputter a thin nano-gold shell on the surface of the solidified spider silk to increase the sensitivity of the spider silk fiber to sugar concentration. Finally, they made an optical fiber sensor with a diameter of about the diameter of a human hair that is visible to the naked eye.
According to reports, through the optical physics principle of "surface plasmon resonance (SPR)", scientists can calculate the refractive index of different sugars on metals to learn about concentration changes. The optical fiber sensor developed by Liu Chengyang's team has been experimentally confirmed that the sensing function can maintain the same sensitivity within a year and can operate normally at room temperature and human body temperature.
Liu Chengyang said that diabetic patients need to monitor blood sugar before and after meals. A sensor that can be used in the human body for a long time and accurately measure blood sugar in real time will not only solve the patient's problems, but also achieve the goal of precision medicine and benefit more chronic patients.
