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Highly-Conductive Shark Jelly Could Inspire New Tech (gizmag.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from UC Santa Cruz, the University of Washington, and the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason found shark jelly to have the highest proton conductivity ever seen in a biological material. The jelly's conductivity begins to approach that of leading proton-conducting polymers. Tiny organs in the skin of sharks, skates and rays, called the ampullae of Lorenzini, are key to the ability. Scientists believe that the jelly is what has been able to allow these animals to detect weak electric fields produced by their prey, as the organs, which are visible as pores in the skin, are connected to electrosensory cells via long, jelly-filled canals. Marco Rolandi, a co-author on a paper detailing the findings in Science Advances, sees potential use for the "shark jelly" in the development of new or enhanced materials or even the creation of new sensor technology. "The observation of high proton conductivity in the jelly is very exciting," Rolandi said. "We hope that our findings may contribute to future studies of the electrosensing function of the ampullae of Lorenzini and the organ overall, which is itself rather exceptional."
Sharks are pretty amazing. Did you also know they do not get cancer, and generally don't get sick at all?
Sharks (and camels weirdly enough) have an extremely efficient immune system. Instead of producing antibodies, which are around 150 kDa in size to fight disease like most other multi-cellular creatures, they produce a much more efficient molecule, a single-domain antibody, essentially the same thing but around 12 to 15 kDa in size. The smaller size provides less variance in the produced molecule to fight the disease which makes it far more specific to eliminating it. If someone were crazy enough to raise and bleed sharks, they'd make highly efficient biologic drug molecules or diagnostic biomarkers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-domain_antibody