Contact: Lee Siegel
leesiegel@ucomm.utah.edu
801-581-8993
University of Utah

Worm Can Use Egg Shell for its Tube

Caption: In the laboratory, the sandcastle worm will use what it is given -- in this case pieces of chicken egg shell -- to build the tube in which it lives, attaching the pieces using glue produced naturally by the worm. A synthetic version of the glue has been developed at the University of Utah by bioengineers Russell Stewart and Hui Shao, and the hope it eventually will be used for gluing together small bone fragments in fractured faces, skulls and joints such as the knees and wrists.

Credit: Russell Stewart, University of Utah.

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