Porcupine quills – ouch!!

Jan 14, 2015 • 2:22 AM UTC

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Microorganisms

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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I have often seen an image of a pet animal online with complete face (poor dog) covered with porcupine quills. I can only imagine it would hurt..
A couple of days ago, some students were walking around with a bag of quills. I got very excited.. You don’t want to know why they had them, but apparently – you can legally buy some kind of “farmed quills”.. I don’t support this practice, but I could not pass the chance to look at the quills in Foldscope. So I pulled out a quill, pulled out my Foldscope and here is what I saw…
I was expecting to be able to see some barbed structures (none are visible here). But I not sure what species of porcupine we are looking at here. I know American Porcupine does have some barbed ends. In retrospect, I should have tried to rub the quills together to make some of the barbes stand out.. I still have the quill, so I will try this next.

A detailed video (with my reactions captured) here:

A simple lesson to also learn here – nothing is as sharp as it seems, when seen through a microscope.
cheers
manu
References:
1. Cho, Ankrum, Guo, Chester, Yang, Kashyap, Campbell, Wood, Rijal, Karnik, Langer & Karp. 2012. Microstructured barbs on the North American porcupine quill enable easy tissue penetration and difficult removal. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1216441109
Here is a fun reference that explores uses of porcupine quills in medical devices.