Sea cucumbers can rapidly change their body stiffness, providing a template for medical material development

According to a physics website, scientists at Queen Mary University of London have discovered for the first time that sea cucumbers can "transform" - rapidly changing the stiffness of their bodies, which will provide a valuable basis for developing new biomaterials for medical applications.

All animals have collagen tissue, but a type of marine invertebrate - echinoderms (including sea cucumbers and starfish) - has collagen tissue with unique properties that can rapidly change body stiffness. This type of collagen is called "mutable collagen tissue (MCT)" and is controlled by the nervous system; it is very useful when these organisms need to "become gelatinous" upon encountering predators. The Queen Mary research team used X-ray technology to analyze the body wall of sea cucumbers. The ability of sea cucumbers to change the shape of their body wall is due to their ability to change the stiffness of the protein-rich interfibrillar matrix, which is combined with collagen fibers.

The head of the study said: "The mutable collagen tissue in sea cucumbers may be a template for biomimetic materials. It can be used to design flexible scaffolds for tissue engineering, cosmetic wrinkle removal for anti-aging skin, implantable biosensors, and soft robot materials."