A severed mosquito proboscis can be turned into an ultra-thin 3D printing nozzle, which could eventually help in the production of tissues and organs for transplantation.

The authors from the Canadian McGill University were inspired to develop it by necessity. They encountered difficulties in finding nozzles for ultra-precise printing. The thinnest ones on the market have an internal channel measuring 35 micrometers and cost about $80 apiece.

Scientists have experimented with techniques such as pulling glass capillaries, but these nozzles have proven expensive to manufacture and extremely fragile.

“It made us wonder if there was an alternative. If Mother Nature can provide us with what we need at an affordable price, why do it ourselves?” — Mechanical engineer Changhong Cao, who led the research, argues reasonably.

Graduate student Justin Puma was tasked with finding a natural organ that would cope with this task. A variety of options came into his field of vision – from the stings of scorpions to the poisonous teeth of snakes. In the end, the mosquito’s proboscis turned out to be the most suitable, namely its tougher version, growing in femalesyellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti— it allows you to print structures with a thickness of only 20 micrometers.

The developers called this technology3D necro printing. An article about her was published in the magazine Science Advances.

An experienced technician can produce up to six of these nozzles per hour, and each costs less than a dollar, making the process easily scalable, Cao says. These natural nozzles can be installed on existing 3D printers. Given their biological origin, they last a relatively long time: after two weeks, about 30% of them begin to fail, but when stored frozen they remain functional for up to a year.

The technique was tested using Pluronic F-127 bioink, which is capable of forming scaffolds for biological tissues, including blood vessels. This opens the way to the potential creation of artificial organs for transplantation.

This is not the first time that body parts from small animals have been used in machinery. Previously, they have used a moth antenna in a drone that searches for odors, and dead spiders as mechanical grippers.

The work was another example of how difficult it is to beat nature’s tools, said Christian Griffiths of Swansea University in the UK. “The evolution of mosquitoes took millions of years, and we are trying to catch up. Perhaps this is where they have an advantage over us,” he explained.