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Spider Silk Finally Ready For Commercialization

Posted by timothy on from the and-it's-delicious dept.

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?

2 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not spider thread. Yeast string. by random+coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Not spider thread. Yeast string. by random+coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.