Silkworms fed quantum dots make silk that glows in the dead of night
Nanometre-sized semiconductors extracted from mulberry leaves make silkworms and their silk emit a robust crimson glow
A glowing silkworm Huan-Ming Xiong
Silkworms that eat nanometre-sized particles known as quantum dots produce glow-in-the-dark silk.
Researchers have beforehand used gene enhancing to make fluorescent silkworms, however these strategies will be expensive and introduce random genetic mutations which are dangerous to the worms.
As a substitute, Huan-Ming Xiong at Fudan College in Shanghai, China, and his colleagues extracted carbon quantum dots, nanometre-sized semiconductors that emit particular wavelengths of sunshine, from mulberry leaves and fed them to the silkworms.
Xiong and his staff examined dozens of various carbon dots on the silkworms to search out candidates with …
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