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Genetically Engineered Silkworms Spin Spider Silk
disco_tracy writes "Silkworms have been modified to produce spider silk, creating a fabric that could be used in everything from bulletproof clothing to artificial tendons." For some reason, this is far less revolting to me than the idea of spider silk being milked out of goats.
Does whatever a spider, um...
Someone dear to me didn't survive the milk, you see.. the cow tipped over.. and..
*runs*
How it's made TV show already mentioned that in the Techno Flash segment, BACK IN SEASON 1!!!
...alien beings are harvesting silk from genetically-modified humans.
I am usually very critical of GMO tech but even I have to say this is cool.
Some of the best (sometimes prophetic) fictional quotes ever.
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"Compared to normal spider silk, it's not as strong," said Malcolm Fraser, a scientist from the University of Notre Dame. "But we are confident that, this being our first attempt, that we will be able to tweak the system to bring the system closer to the strength of true spider silk."
--
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"They're takin our jerbs!"
-The Spider Goats
Visualize Whirled Peas
Using that silk should produce extra-sharp scytes...maybe you could even skip a lot of the required steps and sharpen them next directly with moonlight.
I agree, genetically engineered silkworms *are* cool.
Well that's a relief. I much prefer the idea of a Really Big Silk Worm than a Really Big Spider to spin the cable for the space elevator. I for one welcome our new silk moth overlords.
They are doing the thing in reverse !!!
Instead of inventing silkworms spitting out spider silk they should invent spiders that spitting out SILKWORM SILK that are very useful in making silk fabric !!
Kimono Robes made with Spider silk, now you'll never get away from her, scary.
somebody tries to tape these things to their wrists and jump out of a window in a leotard...
Somewhere in China, a general is pleading, "Mr. President, we must not allow a silkworm spider silk gap! "
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Spider Worm, Spider Worm, does whatever a Spider Worm does, can it swing, from a web, yes it can, because its a Spider Silk Worm, look out, here comes the Spider Wuuuuurm~~~
Hats off to the people who made this happen. I can't wait to buy shirts made out of spider silk.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Spectra cable is right on par strengthwise, but it's a chemical nightmare to make compared to silk. You don't have to truck away thousands of gallons of spent sulfuric acid. Silk isn't rejected by the body. And if it can be made in the right organisms it can be pretty cheap. Goats or plants would make the fiber at a very reasonable price point, silkworms are still orders of magnitude better than spiders. As spiders eat the silk and each other.
So, when silk worms finally do make silk as strong as spiders' silk, then will those silk moths be able to open their own cocoons?
Spider silk is already on the world market. I got a nice carpet on the living room floor - made in Belgium.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
True. But how do you overclock them?
I am tired of the ridiculous "ten times stronger than Kevlar" or "ten times stronger than steel" and such garbage.
For the record: Kevlar is not particularly strong, compared to other high-end materials. What it is though, is ductile - that is, absorbs a nice amount of energy while being plastically deformed. Spider silk does this even better.
Steel can be had in strengths that vary between as low as 200 MPa (bad cast iron) to 3000 MPa (piano wire).
Kevlar is somewhere at 800 MPa or so - stronger than regular construction steel (235-420 MPa) but weaker than hardened sheet steel (900-1300 MPa).
The strongest material you may encounter outside of a laboratory is glass fiber, which can reach strengths of up to 5000 MPa.
Carbon fiber is weaker (~2000 MPa) than glass fiber, but it is more rigid - which is the sought after property most of the time.
Titanium, while having some nice properties, isn't incredibly strong either - around 1000 MPa at best.
Even when considering density, steel usually holds its own quite well - especially when designing things that are supposed to have a certain rigidity, where steel really shines - and while exotic materials may have advantages they are never along the line of "ten times", more like "two times" at best.
I'm a mechanical design engineer and I am really not amused when people show me their titanium golf clubs and claim that it is ten times stronger than steel an cost a hundred times more than gold, or other preposterous claims like that. Titanium is $100/kg, tops.
I think they even meet the criteria as well if you're careful when unwrapping the cocoons.
Rough handling may cause them to go multi-threaded.
good god, the noun you want is effect.
maybe you know as little about plant chromosomes as you do about english spelling?
i won't even touch the godwin invocation
shame on you, mods. if Monsanto is evil, wee need more than FUD for insight
r.i.p. rational discussion on slashdot, it was good knowing you
Electrospinning is another way to obtain small fibers (nanometer order).
In our lab experiments are setup around spinning polycaprolactone (proteins (spider silk) are also amides). The choice was made in function of the surface modification possibilities for medical purposes.
Look up electrospinning in wikipedia.
They are very brief on the applications but they got the theory right.
It's a great way of testing basic knowledge of electricity.
A made-for-TV horror/sci-fi movie coming soon to the SyFy network? Megaspider Silkworm Invasion!
ad astra per alia porci
I for one, welcome our new Spider Worm Overlords.
Silkworms are looking more promising than goats because they have the body parts to actually spin the silk. With goats, the silk gets filtered from the milk (which hopefully is disposed of) and then has to be spun via some post-processing technology. The best this has resulted in are threads that are around an order of magnitude thicker than spiders can manage, according to the highly-esteemed Wikipedia.
I read another article on this. To make sure the gene mutation took, they tied it to another one that makes the silkworms themselves glow when hit with a black light, and their eyes glow red. At least there's a reason these mutants have glowing red eyes!
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Some of it is stronger that other. As far as I know there are only a few examples of spider textiles -- http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/spider-silk/.
What I want is bulletproof tendons and artificial clothing. How about it, science?
-kgj
I realize you meant "tensile strength", but my brain produced some pretty weird imagery from my initial mis-parsing of this as "tonsils strength". :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
You are agruing (Y2K) with scientists (killer bees) about a scientific issue (Hubble Space Telescope) on a scientific website (STS Challenger). What makes you thing you can win (Thalidomide)?
Scientists never make mistakes (Chernoby). They're too smart for us (Mars Polar Lander). Slashdot polls say so (Vioxx).
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe." ~ Albert Einstein
For clarity's sake and to make sure we're all using agreed vocabulary here, GM = genetically modified = developed using recombinant technology that splices in DNA from other species, families, phyla, even kingdoms. Naturally bred = developed using traditional cross-breeding of variants of the same or very close species, usually (but not always) producing viable (fertile) offspring.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Modern Japanese has only five vowel sounds: a like American English "father", i like Am Eng "eeek!", u like Am Eng "oo, that's cool", e like Am Eng "editor", and o as an unrounded "oh" sound, which doesn't happen so much in standard American English, but is awful close to Minnesotan English "oh sure".
Certain sound combinations don't exist in Japanese phonetics, such as du, di, tu, ti, si, f + anything other than u, anything with v, etc. Such sounds can be expressed in either of the two kana syllabaries (more below), but these are innovations to render sounds that have no inherent place in the Japanese language, and folks older than maybe 50 might not be able to pronounce them properly.
Words written in Japanese using the hiragana syllabary use the i for long e and i, the u for long o and u, and the a for long a. Romanizations of hiragana would thus either use a macron (horizontal bar; this post uses circumflexes instead of macrons since Slashdot eats the macron entities) over the long vowel or include the additional extending vowel.
Foreign words are generally written in Japanese using the katakana syllabary. Stressed syllables in English generally become lengthened vowels in Japanese, and long vowels in katakana are rendered using the nobashi (i.e. "lengthener" - that horizontal line that looks like the kanji for "one"). Romanizations of katakana thus either use a macron over the long vowel or just duplicate long vowels.
Japanese is a moraic language rather than a stressed language. This is a very foreign concept for English: a mora is a unit of time in speaking, rather than volume or pitch. Where English uses stress, with the speaker's voice increasing and decreasing in volume and (to a lesser extent) pitch, Japanese uses morae (or moras), with a vowel (or stop) taking a set amount of time. Much as certain words in English are differentiated by stress (such as "record" as a noun versus "record" as a verb), many more word pairs in Japanese are differentiated by how many morae they include. The word shugo has two morae and means "(grammatical) subject", while shûgô has four morae and means "gathering, assembly". The word jiko has two morae and means "accident", while jikkô has four morae and means "execution, carrying something out". The word judô has three morae and means "passive", while jûdô has four morae and means "flexible way", or more more familiarly, the martial art that's also an Olympic event.
Putting all this together, "rape seed" simply transliterated into katakana (as foreign words would be) and then transliterated back into rômaji ("Roman characters", i.e. the alphabet) would come out as either rêpu shîdo or reepu shiido.
And that's all for today's Beginner Japanese lesson! :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Another possible point to research is the apparent correlation between the spread of GMO soy in the US food chain and the rise in soy allergies. These allergies also seem to be restricted to the US population, from what little I've read about it.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The GP is a statement of opinion, in which case the statement itself is all the citation needed. And saying "the tech looks quite promising, but we need more research" (which sounds to me like the GP's main point) does not a Luddite make.
Or was there something else you were reacting to? Maybe I've missed your point.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
From all I've read on research into spider silk, one of the key components that we continue to fail to reproduce is the physical spinning of the extracted protein mix. That's why goatmilk silk failed -- no spinning at all. And that's why silkworm spidersilk has achieved some level of useful production, since the silkworms do produce a fiber and not just the raw protein mixed up in a liquid, but also why it will probably fail to be stronger than regular spidersilk -- the spinning process most likely isn't what a spider would use to produce its strongest silk.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
As reported by Wired on 2009-09-23 in the story 1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth. Fascinating read, especially if you're like me and wholly entranced by the concept of a super-fiber like spider silk.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
What's the difference between GM and naturally bred?
Not much. Humans have been dinking around with DNA for a long time, but even because it has "natural" in the term doesn't make it a "good" thing. All natural snake venom will kill you just as sure as cyanide.
Black widow silk was considered the ideal material for cross hairs on telescopes. The difference from silk to Darwins bark spider silk is astounding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tensile_strength
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.