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
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.