- Using antibodies from camels and alpacas, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found a way to deliver anticancer viruses directly to tumor cells, leaving other types of cells uninfected. more »
- In addition to all their positive attributes, over the past decade alpacas have been the financial ruin of Americans across the nation. Not long ago, alpaca farming was a booming industry, with the top breeding alpacas selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nowadays, the few remaining alpaca farmers struggle to stay afloat. Alpaca rescues have cropped up to save the animals who have outlived their economic utility. more »
- Alpaca fibre has potential uses in the textile and fashion industries as a luxurious fibre for high-end garments. For such applications, the alpaca fleece first needs to be processed to produce a clean, high quality, uniformly fine fibre for products such as roving and yarn. Prior to mechanically processing in the mills, the fleeces were cleaned, washed and dried for further studies. In this applied research, alpaca fleeces were processed using modified Belfast Mini-mills fibre processing equipment. The alpaca fibre was processed to roving through a series of five machines to produce fine, clean, and uniform fibre products required for textile and related industries. more »
- People who process alpaca fiber into products are well aware that dark fleece behaves differently than lighter fleece in processing as well as in many final products. Even if the fineness and uniformity of a batch of dark fleeces is identical to that of a batch of white, for instance, the yarns made from those fleeces will be denser (and heavier) at the same gauge and exhibit less memory, making its performance in end products different than yarns made from light fiber. The reason for the difference is that the fibers making up the fleeces at the darker end of the spectrum of alpaca colors have less curvature than those from lighter-colored fleeces of similar fineness and length. The question is, why? The analysis below hints at a possible answer. more »
- As part of our work using data from the Alpaca Owners’ Association (AOA) EPD database to examine whether fleece color affects the expression of fleece traits, we looked at the relationship between color and the EPDs for staple length for over 1300 Huacaya males. We found a pattern that suggests that faster fleece growth rates have a visible dilutive effect on the color we see in fawn, beige and white animals, by increasing the length of the hair relative to the amount of pigment produced to color it. more »