Mosquito proboscis adapted as an attachment for a 3D printer
Changhong Cao et al. 2025
A severed mosquito proboscis can be turned into an extremely thin 3D printing attachment, which could help create replacement tissues and organs for transplantation.
Changhong Cao at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues developed a technique they called 3D necroprinting because they were unable to find nozzles thin enough to handle the job of making very thin structures. The narrowest nozzle they could find on the market had an internal opening of 35 micrometers and cost a cool £60 ($80).
They experimented with methods such as glass pulling, but found that these attachments also turned out to be expensive and very fragile.
“It made us wonder if there was an alternative,” says Cao. “If Mother Nature can provide what we need at an affordable price, why do it ourselves?”
The researchers instructed a graduate student to Justin Pumawith the search for a natural organ that could handle the task, considering everything from scorpion stings to snake fangs. They eventually discovered that the mosquito's proboscis is specifically a tougher version found in female Egyptian mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) – allowed them to print structures up to 20 micrometers thick.
Cao says a skilled worker can make six nozzles per hour from mosquito mouthparts for less than a dollar each, making the process easy to scale. Natural attachments can be installed on existing 3D printers and are relatively durable given their biological origin: after two weeks, about 30 percent of them begin to break down, but they can be stored frozen for up to a year.
The team tested this technique using a bioink called Pluronic F-127, which can create scaffolds for biological tissues, including blood vessels – a potential method creation of replacement organs.
There have been several other examples of small creature parts being used in machines, including a moth antenna used in smell-seeking drone And dead spiders used as mechanical grippers.
Christian Griffiths from Swansea University, UK, says the work is another example of human engineers trying to match nature's tools.
“You've got a couple million years of mosquito evolution: we're trying to catch up,” he says. “I think they might have an advantage over us there.”
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