Nov 7, 2005, 7:14 GMT
Sydney - For thousands of years fleas have rated right up there with cockroaches, rats and mosquitoes as the least liked of creatures. Their nasty habits include biting, infesting bedding and spreading disease.
Australian scientists however now reckon there is one thing we can admire and learn from them: their prodigious ability to jump.
According to Chris Elvin, a researcher at the government's CSIRO research organisation, the secret is a pad of rubbery stuff called resilin in their legs that they can compress at will and then release like a coiled spring.
If humans had such a facility, all other things being equal, they could leap 100-storey buildings. And not just once but thousands of times a day.
Elvin and his team have isolated the gene that produces resilin and cultured it in E.coli bacteria.
'What we have been able to do is recreate in the lab what nature has taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve,' Elvin told national broadcaster ABC.
Resilin could prove a miracle substance for use in anything from running shoes to synthetic arteries and replacement spinal discs. What's so exciting about it is its amazing strength and elasticity.
It's resilin that allows bees to flap their wings 720,000 times an hour without them dropping off after a few weeks.
'We know from nature that the resilin in bees' wings must last for 500 million cycles because that's how many times they flap their wings,' he said.
Elvin and his colleagues, writing in a paper published in the the journal Nature, reckon that manufactured resilin could be used as a polymer to repair the walls of damaged arteries.
'Resilin resembles cross-linked elastin in human arteries, which must also survive for the entire lifetime of the organism,' he said. Another use for the endlessly bendable substance could be in artificial discs in the spinal column.
As with most discoveries, medical applications will be long in coming and have to get past a comprehensive testing programme.
'There are a number of other issues that of course one needs to consider and this is why I mention cautiously that this is a long way in the future,' he said.
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