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Spider Silk Finally Ready For Commercialization
An anonymous reader writes: We've been hearing about little bits of progress for decades, but spider silk fibers are finally ready to be delivered at commercial scale, thanks to three scientist-founders and large investments ($40M) from SF and SV venture capitalists. Who'll be the first to build a web slinger?
SPIDER DICK
I'm 12 and what is this
If you're 12, this is a real opportunity for you to shoot webs from the wrists of your Spider Man costume.
I thought they were doing this with goat - spiders.
These folks have come up with an idea to market a threat with some (but not all) the properties of spider silk. Using yeast. While I am more than willing to admit that this material sounds interesting, it is most certainly not spider silk.
But it's not the first time we've seen an utterly misleading headline in both the article and in the Slashdot post.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Spider Man, Spider Man.
Discovers silk can't hold a grown Man.
Look out! There falls the Spider Man!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
for one thing.
To be followed by newer and much better semi-rigid plastic body armor.
To be followed by armor piercing plastic bullets
to be followed by really bizzare goats (where the silk comes from)
These folks have come up with an idea to market a threat with some (but not all) the properties of spider silk. Using yeast. While I am more than willing to admit that this material sounds interesting, it is most certainly not spider silk. But it's not the first time we've seen an utterly misleading headline in both the article and in the Slashdot post.
TFA states "The company has developed a synthetic alternative to spider silk by engineering proteins identical to the natural threads stretched across the nooks in your basement."
Care to list the properties that the natural silk has that the synthetic silk doesn't?
What if this 'spider silk' attracts spiders?
Can you imagine wear a piece of clothing made of it and suddenly spiders are coming out of the woodwork and crawling all over you?
What if someone gets a Yeast infection from this genetically modified Yeast? Will they end up with Spider silk coming out of the infected area?
My first thought at seeing the title was "spider silk? Is that a branch off of silkroad?"
Raising 40m is fine and all, but something tells me I'm not gonna be able to purchase a spool of this stuff in 2016 like the article boasts. That's just something you say to get media coverage and further investors.
Structure; Natural silk owes most of its properties to the structure the proteins are woven into at nano-scale. They've synthesized the proteins in the lab before, but that is a long way from synthesizing the silk.
IOW, vaporware.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Reading is fundamental. Re-read what I wrote.
Or I guess I'll bring it down to your level. Hair is made from keratin. So are finger nails. If I engineer a yeast to produce keratin, will it be hair, fingernails, or neither that the yeas produces? But the protein is the same.
Care to list the properties that the natural silk has that the synthetic silk doesn't?
That "New Spider" smell?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I'm 50. I can't wait to shoot webs from the wrists of my Spider Man costume.
The individual proteins are like Lego blocks. You can make them in mass easily. The problem is how do you stack them together. One way makes a chain with strength and/or elasticity. Another way makes kinks and loses much of the characteristics. The silk-in-goats researchers and others have made the blocks before, but haven't gotten them put together right. But they are focused on artificial tendons and bulletproof vests. The spinnerette on a spider puts the blocks together correctly as it extrudes the filament. A fermentation vat can't / won't.
http://www.wired.com/2015/06/b...
Having a bad day, are we? It was an honest question politely asked. No need to be a dick about it.
You didn't politely ask. You were dishonest. You put words in my mouth:
" What makes you think they are not?"
I did not say nor think that they had not created the protein. I answered the question in the post above.
You're still telling lies saying your question was honest and polite. Don't be an asshole and then call me a dick, when I treat your dishonesty and rudeness as they deserve.
Who else thought this would be about foreign spiders getting H1-B's, and taking jobs from American spiders?
To my knowledge this has already been achieved. Specifically, a Japanese company called Spiber spin synthetic spider silk manufactured by this kind of process. They've made enough to weave a dress out of it as a demonstration and have some kind of project to build a factory, which should produce some hundred kilograms per year of it sometime during 2015. However, their website isn't full of updates and much of the material is in Japanese.
There's also a Swedish biomedicine company called Spiber Technologies that makes this kind of stuff to grow cells on. Reading wikipedia also gives a couple of examples
Still, if they achieve really large scale production that may be nice even if they aren't first. The focus on textile applications might also be indicative of being able to make large amounts of fiber.
The spinnerette on a spider puts the blocks together correctly as it extrudes the filament. A fermentation vat can't / won't.
Apparently, the article has a photo of a synthetic spinneret-like thingy that does that now.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I wonder where I could've gotten the idea that lab in question had created actual spider silk and not just it's protein building blocks? Oh yeah, it's in the title of the article and the TFA's headline.
Spider Silk Finally Ready For Commercialization
A Bay Area Startup Spins Lab-Grown Silk
All I did was honestly ask for some clarification, and the AC who responded to that request wrote a clear explanation that clarified the matter for me. I wasn't trying to be dishonest, and I certainly wasn't trying to put words into your mouth.
Your reply, on the other hand, began with a patronizing insult:
Reading is fundamental. Re-read what I wrote. Or I guess I'll bring it down to your level.
If you would have left those first three sentences out of you post, I would have considered that a polite reply and I would have understood the differences you originally pointed out. But you didn't leave them out and unfortunately, I felt insulted and responded to you in kind. That was my bad, and I apologize.
1) The yeast can make the same proteins. However, what makes spider silk's properties so amazing is what the spider does with them inside/with its spinnerets. simply making the building blocks of the silk does not give you spider silk. The chemical work has been done before in a lab.
2. My comment was that this material was made to be aritificial spider silk. Both the article and the summary headline read "spider silk". Even if this material was 100% exactly the same as natural silk,it would not be spider silk. t would be artificial spider silk, as true spider silk only comes from spiders.
So "spider silk is ready for commercialization" is not the same thing as "artificial spider silk is ready for commercialization". I was very interested in what innovation they had created to allow the commercialization of spider silk harvesting. The current methods involves actually tying the buggers down on their backs and pulling the thread out. Seeing that they had only managed to utilize yeast to make the replicate the principal ingredient in spider silk left me disappointed.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
If I'm ignorant about something, I'm not afraid to ask questions. If I'm wrong about something, I am more than happy to admit it. Sorry you confuse that with stupidity.
Don't be an asshole and then call me a dick
You prefer the other way around?
Don't be a doughnut and call me a hotdog...
Spider silk in equivalent quantities has tensile strenght above mild steel and it's tougher than kelvlar. (yes toughness is actually a real quantiative metric if a bad choice of words).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Actually modifying the genes of female sheep causes the females to make the proteins in their udders. Milking the goats and separating the proteins allows them to be made into spider silk. We may be seeing some great fishing line and shoe laces might be pretty darned strong soon.
For spider silk has been displaced as the worlds strongest material by limpet teeth: http://www.iflscience.com/plan...
Strength in a line or wire is great. If your shoe laces gets stuck in the escalator their weakness is a feature.
"The company has developed a synthetic alternative to spider silk by engineering proteins identical to the natural threads stretched across the nooks in your basement."
I read this as saying the lab has re-created the actual silk, not just the protein building blocks.
I don't know anything about spider silk or molecular biology - that's why I asked. Given the quote from TFA, I don't think asking the question again is unreasonable - much less dishonest or rude.
I wish you hadn't posted as AC so my mod points would matter....
as true spider silk only comes from spiders.
That's sort of like saying "true Champagne only comes from Champagne, France" or "true Parmesan only comes from Parma, Italy". Technically true by definition, but how *practically* true is it for real use cases?
What are the critical properties which this artificial spider silk doesn't have that real spider silk does? Or is the only different the fact that it doesn't come from a spider's butt? Or is this a distinction without a difference, like the people who insist that "natural" vitamin C is different from "artificial" vitamin C?
Here in the EU, calling anything not from Parma Parmesan is not legal. Same for Champagne and Champagne.