Normally, what do you do when you decide to eat a fish? Descaling it would be the normal practice, as eating a fish with its scales on isn’t exactly the most efficient way of digging in. Ever wondered whether there is a way to “recycle” those scales into something else more useful? Junzo Tanaka’s research group at Tokyo Institute of Technology might have stumbled upon a potential goldmine, after managing to use fish scales to develop artificial bone. Basically, they had an “Eureka!” moment that beamed the fact that the collagen which fish scales are made up of boast a similar structure to the the thickest layer of the human cornea, which is the corneal stroma.
The artificial bone developed using fish scales also has other benefits compared to using collagen from pig skin as is the standard practice at the moment. Viruses in pigs are able to migrate to people and cause illnesses, but the same does not happen with fish. Apart from that, this artificial bone also has a far higher density, making it strong enough as a replacement. Not only that, the amount of time taken for artificial bone to come into existence using fish collagen takes around 3 months – which is twice as fast as that of using collagen from our porcine friends.
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