GMO Silkworms

[Guest guest]

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/26623/?p1=A2

These silkworm fibers look just like the ones I have on my body.

Tough Fibers

A startup says it's jumped one of the big hurdles on the way to making

artificial spider silk.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

By Bourzac

E-mail Audio » Print

Researchers have been trying to make artificial spider silk for decades. Now a

startup claims to have overcome one of the main challenges in synthesizing the

lightweight, stronger-than-steel fibers.

Kraig Biocraft Laboratories has made genetically modified silkworms that produce

fibers incorporating spider-silk proteins. The resulting fibers are much

stronger, more flexible, and finer than silk made by normal silkworms. The

company says it believes it will be able to match the properties of spider silk

within the next year. The company hopes to sell the first generation of fibers

to companies that will make stronger everyday silk products. Its ultimate goal

is to mass-produce artificial spider silk, which could be used to make very

strong and lightweight products including bulletproof vests, composite materials

for vehicles and sports equipment, and even new construction materials.

Spiders make many varieties of silk, and many of these fibers are stronger than

steel. Mimicking such silk and developing ways of producing it industrially has

long been a goal of materials scientists. But spiders are too aggressive to be

farmed, so researchers have made transgenic animals that make the spider

proteins. But that isn't enough, because simply producing the protein components

of these materials is not enough--you have to mimic the way spiders put them

together by spinning a thread.

" Genetic engineers have been focused on making organisms that produce as much

spider-silk protein as possible, but this is like dumping a load of bricks in

the yard and asking why you don't have a house, " says Kim , founder and

CEO of Kraig Biocraft, based in Lansing, Michigan. Bacteria, for example, can be

made to produce spider-silk proteins, and the Canadian biotech company Nexia

even succeeded in creating goats that excreted high levels of spider-silk

proteins in their milk. But they lacked the means to assemble these proteins

into usable silk.

Other groups have created transgenic silkworms that make spider silk, but the

worms didn't integrate the foreign proteins into the fiber structure, and

fiber's mechanical properties didn't significantly improve over what natural

silkworms make. The worms' natural systems for spinning fibers are tailored to

their own natural proteins. " There's no reason the silkworms would necessarily

include the spider protein in their fiber, " says Randy , professor of

molecular biology at the University of Wyoming. has sequenced several

spider-silk genes.

Another article

http://news.discovery.com/tech/spider-silk-silkworms-genetic-engineering.html