Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
IOW, vaporware.
Here is the relevant translation chart.
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
All the spider goat samples went udderly baaaad.
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.
"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.