Cleaner shrimp could help keep foods, paints, cosmetics white: study

0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Xinhua, May 31, 2023
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JERUSALEM, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A multinational research team has discovered a new material in cleaner shrimps that produces one of the most efficient white reflectors in nature, Israel's Ben Gurion University (BGU) said on Tuesday.

The discovery could lead to the development of new, safe organic whitening materials for white paint, foods like white bread, cosmetics, and more, the BGU said in a statement.

Such materials may thus replace unhealthy inorganic nanoparticles, like titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, used today as whitening agents, it said.

In a study, published in the journal Nature Photonics, researchers from Israel, China, Britain, and India examined the white stripes of the Pacific cleaner shrimp, which was the character Jacques in the famous Walt Disney film Finding Nemo.

This shrimp uses the white stripes on its cuticle and appendages to attract fish and then cleans them by eating parasites off their body.

The team found that the stripes are made of an ultra-thin layer of densely packed particles of the small molecule called isoxanthopterin.

Despite being less than 5 microns thick, the whiteness produced by the shrimp is extremely bright, making it one of the thinnest and most efficient white materials.

"It is one of the first times we have learned an entirely new optics principle from studying an organism," the researchers concluded. Enditem

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