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Companies Genetically Engineer Spider Silk
gthuang88 writes: Spider silk is touted for its strength and potential to be used in body armor, sports gear, and even artificial tendons and implants. Now several companies including EntoGenetics, Kraig Labs, and Araknitek have developed genetic approaches to producing commercial quantities of the stuff. One method is to implant spider genes into silkworms, which then act as spider-silk factories. Another is to place the gene that encodes spider web production into the DNA of goats; these "spidergoats" then produce milk containing spider-silk proteins that can be extracted. There's still a long way to go, however, and big companies like DuPont and BASF have tried and failed to commercialize similar materials.
Cool, Giant eight legged spider goats, head butting little kids into the ravine.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Just read the article myself;
This is still about the protein itself, not the mechanical processing done by the spider to create the unique fibers they produce.
Basically, the spider's silk protein is a bit like a "hook and latch", much like a zipper's teeth. Mass producing the protein produces "Zipper teeth", but that does not result in the unique conformation of a zipped up zipper.
For that, you need the zipper pull.
That's what a spider's spinnarets do. As the liquid crystal solution of spider protein gets pulled into the spinnaret, it gets compressed mechanically in a special fashion, which causes spontaneous self-assembly of these "zipper teeth", into a fully assembled, fully interlocking "zipper" of interlocked protein molecules. It is this fully interlocked assemblage that gives spider silk its unique mechanical properties.
The shape and length of these structures in the spider's abdomen are crucial to correct assembly.
As the linked Nature paper I linked to points out, this process is NOT incorporated in any currently used textile processing system.
Getting bulk, high quality protein is only PART of getting mass produced spider silk. The other part is the mechanical processing.
Silkworms do not have the structures that spiders do for processing their silk. Instead, silkworms produce a kind of salivary secretion through a much larger orifice. This orifice is much larger than a spider's spinnaret, and is not the same shape. This is why silk worms producing spider proteins will not produce silk of the same quality.
Now, we have some pretty kick ass micro-pipette technology these days (and surface morphology control on silicon substrates from PV solar research) that could probably be used to create synthetic spinnarettes--- Just wet one side with the silk solution, then draw silk fibers from the other side.
I just have never heard of any serious research into creating such synthetic spinnaret technologies.