Hagfish slime and the disruption of mucus by particles

Caroline Giacomin

Overarching project info:

Hagfish are ocean dwelling fish that consume detritus on the ocean floor and serve as a sort of earthworm of the sea. The hagfish uses slime as a unique defence which deploys in milliseconds into the direction of flow, deterring attacking fish by clogging the mouth and gills with this gummy, slimy substance. The slime has remarkable properties and, to study it further, we can break it into its component parts: mucin vesicles and protein filaments. The mucin vesicles are the primary focus of this research as they can be deployed in various environments to generate mucus modelling various environments.

1) In fish farming, the transition of fish from fresh to salt water (e.g. salmon), or the reverse, is often a point in the life cycle where diseases are most able to infect the fish. The change in mucus properties as the surrounding environment changes is thought to affect the mucus rheology or structure. The project would include fish mucus formation in varied salt contents and measurement of various physical properties of mucus when salt levels change rapidly from the salt level the mucus formed in.

2) An interesting feature of mucus is its ability to attract particles and incorporate them into the network structure. These particles disrupt the network in a variety of ways and the fluid behaviour can give us insights to the tendencies the particles have. Mucus exists in a variety of environments, e.g., in animal respiratory, digestive, and reproductive systems, on the outside of marine life, for snail and slug locomotion. Depending on the purpose of the mucus layer, desired mucus flow properties can be adjusted with particle additions.