Spider Silk Created in Lab

There has been a huge technological advancement in the past few years. A lot of recent startups has greatly revolutionised the uses of technology. Today I encountered really great stuff that is Spider Silk that is created in lab. It may seem pretty boring but once you know about it capabilities you will be amazed. This Spider silk can absorb huge amounts of stress and energy without breaking. The thing that got my attention is it is much more stronger than steel and springier than rubber. It would be great to see if it can be used to make bullet proof vests and other cool stuff. 

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Scientists have never stopped working on mimicking the spider silk. A project that was designed to engineer goats to produce spider silk in their milk was funded by National Science Foundation in 2010 along with other several projects that were focussed on producing spider silk like “spidroins”. Scientists found that spiders produce silk in silk ducts having a pH variation in between 7.6 and 5.7. The interesting thing about this variation in pH is that it helps the silk to act as an self-assembling silk or lock and trigger. 

The scientists also wondered that if they can create an artificial environment similar to the spider’s silk gland then they could get better results. At the end the researchers combined the “spidroins” genes from two spider and made a hybrid combination to know about the results and they found it highly soluble and sensitive to pH. They also experimented to inject this hybrid gene into other bacteria to make more silk. 

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At the end of the process, it produced a very high concentrated solution of spider silk proteins which was a very cloudy solution as found in the real spider’s silk glands. In order to make the silk thread out of it, the scientists used a thin glass capillary and pressurised solution. The silk produced was not much upto the expectations but was very much similar to the natural silk. Further its properties can be improved by doing the rotation of some inner components of the protein.  Want to read more about it?

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