Spider Silk - Attempts at Producing Synthetic Spider Silk

Attempts At Producing Synthetic Spider Silk

Replicating the complex conditions required to produce fibers that are comparable to spider silk has proven difficult to accomplish in a laboratory environment. What follows is a miscellaneous list of attempts on this problem. However, in the absence of hard data accepted by the relevant scientific community, it is difficult to judge whether these attempts have been successful or constructive.

• One approach that does not involve farming spiders is to extract the spider silk gene and use other organisms to produce the spider silk. In 2000, Canadian biotechnology company Nexia successfully produced spider silk protein in transgenic goats that carried the gene for it; the milk produced by the goats contained significant quantities of the protein, 1–2 grams of silk proteins per liter of milk. Attempts to spin the protein into a fiber similar to natural spider silk resulted in fibers with tenacities of 2–3 grams per denier (see BioSteel). Nexia used wet spinning and squeezed the silk protein solution through small extrusion holes in order to simulate the behavior of the spinneret, but this procedure has so far not been sufficient to replicate the properties of native spider silk.
• Extrusion of protein fibers in an aqueous environment is known as "wet-spinning". This process has so far produced silk fibers of diameters ranging from 10 to 60 μm, compared to diameters of 2.5–4 μm for natural spider silk.
• In March 2010, researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) succeeded in making spider silk directly using the bacteria E.coli, modified with certain genes of the spider Nephila clavipes. This approach eliminates the need to milk spiders and allows the manufacture the spider silk in a more cost-effective manner.
• The company Kraig Biocraft Laboratories has used research from the Universities of Wyoming and Notre Dame in a collaborative effort to create a silkworm that has been genetically altered to produce spider silk. In September 2010 it was announced at a press conference at the University of Notre Dame that the effort had been successful.
• The company AMSilk has succeeded in making spidroin using bacteria, and making it into spider silk. They are now focusing on increasing production rate of the spider silk.