Companies Genetically Engineer Spider Silk 82
gthuang88 writes: Spider silk is touted for its strength and potential to be used in body armor, sports gear, and even artificial tendons and implants. Now several companies including EntoGenetics, Kraig Labs, and Araknitek have developed genetic approaches to producing commercial quantities of the stuff. One method is to implant spider genes into silkworms, which then act as spider-silk factories. Another is to place the gene that encodes spider web production into the DNA of goats; these "spidergoats" then produce milk containing spider-silk proteins that can be extracted. There's still a long way to go, however, and big companies like DuPont and BASF have tried and failed to commercialize similar materials.
Spider Goats (Score:2, Insightful)
What could possibly go wrong. Better hope they don't mutate or start biting people.
Re:Spider Goats (Score:5, Funny)
Cool, Giant eight legged spider goats, head butting little kids into the ravine.
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If you were bitten by one, would you have the proportional strength of a spider or of a goat?
Re:Spider Goats (Score:4, Funny)
I bet if one of these bite you, you'll end up with the fussy diet of a goat, and the brains of a spider.
Basically, indistinguishable from your average American.
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Cool, Giant eight legged spider goats, head butting little kids into the ravine.
I don't care what they say, you're OK (no points today).
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There goes my massive MMO spider silk horde. Leave it to science to devalue my investments.
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Implant it into humans (Score:3, Funny)
Then wait until the boys hit puberty.
Of course it would lose all value due to the overabundance so the investment will never pay off.
Waiting for the infringement lawsuit... (Score:5, Informative)
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Whats worse and not even mentioned in the article is that only a handful of spiders produce silk stronger than steel. The ones whose genes were spliced into the goat and silk worm produce a weaker silk. Maybe it was the easiest set of genes to isolate but it was useless as the silk only had a fraction of the strength of steel.
All hail spidergoat (Score:1)
I wish to offer my services to our new spidergoat overlords.
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Spider silk in space (Score:2)
Suspend spider silk from a satellite.
Employ an army of spiders to ferry micro-cargo from earth to space.
Mother Nature still rockin it! (Score:2)
As a species, we've advanced pretty well and can use technology to reproduce all kinds of natural processes. It's easy to be lulled into thinking we can do just about anything. So it's kind of nice to see we still have some tricks to learn. I mean, no one is surprised we can't yet dial-in desired genetic traits a la Gattaca, but engineering spider silk seems fairly simple by comparison. I suppose once we have total control over the individual placement of atoms, at scale, anything really will be possible.
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I suppose once we have total control over the individual placement of atoms, at scale, anything really will be possible.
Yes, possible, but mother nature is also better at discovering advantageous arrangements thru trial and error. We still can't
predict simple protein folds. Many of the substances we take for granted were discovered first naturally being produced
by plants and animals. There are hundreds of substances and techniques where the plant and animal kingdom still is
far and away better than anything we can replicate in the laboratory. Even many medicines are produced in a host whether
that's a pig or an egg.
To GMO or not to GMO? (Score:3)
There are people out there [organicconsumers.org], who are sincerely concerned about whether vitamin-C they are offered was "genetically modified"... How are you going to sell such GMO silk to them?
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You don't. This is how the Amish started. People who don't embrace new technology will, on balance, become marginal. If they aren't marginal, then the whole society will become marginal as technology-using societies surpass it.
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GMO is not even a hypothetical problem if you're not eating it.
The Amish are thriving. Protected by the military and technological strengths and by the freedoms of the United States, their industriousness, relative lack of modern perversions, and high birth rate expands their population and wealth. There are lessons to be learned here, and the country could benefit greatly by learning them.
Re:To GMO or not to GMO? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Amish are thriving.
They exist completely at the whim of their benevolent neighbors. They are here precisely because the Swiss were coming down on them rather hard. If we all became Amish, "we" wouldn't be around for very long.
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In a calamity where resources become scarce, I'd bet on the non-pacifists. The Amish would be completely screwed without their food stocks, farmland, and livestock.
No matter how you look at it, they are completely dependent on the good will of the society around them.
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Someone gave me one of those organic Kind Bars the other day that listed 'non-GMO glucose' as an ingredient. "Thank God!" I thought. I hate it when my C6H12O6 has it's genome altered! And to think, they say the opposition to genetic engineering is just ignorance and marketing.
Yes, and the polio vaccine that had SV40 contamination was pure to the limits of detection at the time (i.e. they had no idea it included SV40 or that SV40 was a threat).
If the vaccine batches had been labeled "non-green monkey serum" as appropriate then that would have correlated with a lack of the adverse outcomes caused by SV40 contamination that the people who were exposed to the other vaccine lots were exposed to.
Your attempt at satire is puerile. In fact, in case you couldn't follow the logic I will r
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That's certainly true — whether the contaminants are genetically modified, or not...
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Absolutely true. The Agent Orange used in Vietnam was approximately 99.5% pure herbicide. Of course, that remaining 0.5% was TCDD...
For example, I'm convinced that in the future people will be revolted thinking about the pharmaceuticals and metabolites we currently dump out untreated from our wastewater treatment plants (and thus the people downstream from us consume).
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Neither the herbicide, nor the TCDD, nor the pharmaceuticals and metabolites you mention have anything to do with genetic modifications — however despicable they may (or may not) be otherwise.
Off-topic much?
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Here you go: some people are applying the precautionary principle due to concerns about potentially as-yet undefined health concerns from consuming GMO foods. "Non-GMO glucose", while an imprecise term, putatively means the glucose was sourced/refined from non-GMO stock materials and thus would be unlikely to have any of the possible contamination they wish to avoid.
Do try to keep up.
wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the magic in spider silk was 2-part.
First, is the molecule-- but the second is how it gets "zipped" into a silk filament by the spider's spinnarets.
http://www.nature.com/nature/j... [nature.com]
Just putting the genes into a silkworm WILL NOT PRODUCE SILK LIKE A SPIDERS!
Producing the proteins in goats wont fix the mechanical processing that spiders do.
This is why these things keeps failing. The protein is only part of the package. They need nano-structure spinnaret simulants to spin the solution with as well.
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Well, reading the article, it appears they know this and have devised ways to do this. Those methods may or may not be cost-effective, which seems to be the gist of the article: Several labs are touting break-throughs in processing spider silk proteins produced by goats, e. coli, etc etc.
Re:wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just read the article myself;
This is still about the protein itself, not the mechanical processing done by the spider to create the unique fibers they produce.
Basically, the spider's silk protein is a bit like a "hook and latch", much like a zipper's teeth. Mass producing the protein produces "Zipper teeth", but that does not result in the unique conformation of a zipped up zipper.
For that, you need the zipper pull.
That's what a spider's spinnarets do. As the liquid crystal solution of spider protein gets pulled into the spinnaret, it gets compressed mechanically in a special fashion, which causes spontaneous self-assembly of these "zipper teeth", into a fully assembled, fully interlocking "zipper" of interlocked protein molecules. It is this fully interlocked assemblage that gives spider silk its unique mechanical properties.
The shape and length of these structures in the spider's abdomen are crucial to correct assembly.
As the linked Nature paper I linked to points out, this process is NOT incorporated in any currently used textile processing system.
Getting bulk, high quality protein is only PART of getting mass produced spider silk. The other part is the mechanical processing.
Silkworms do not have the structures that spiders do for processing their silk. Instead, silkworms produce a kind of salivary secretion through a much larger orifice. This orifice is much larger than a spider's spinnaret, and is not the same shape. This is why silk worms producing spider proteins will not produce silk of the same quality.
Now, we have some pretty kick ass micro-pipette technology these days (and surface morphology control on silicon substrates from PV solar research) that could probably be used to create synthetic spinnarettes--- Just wet one side with the silk solution, then draw silk fibers from the other side.
I just have never heard of any serious research into creating such synthetic spinnaret technologies.
They're missing the point (Score:2)
Indeed, I came here to say much the same - the magic of spider silk is at least as much in the "spinning" as in the protein. Silkworms will presumably make far purer silk-proteins that goats, and might (or might not) possibly even produce a slightly-stronger-than-normal silk themselves, but it won't be anywhere near the same league as true spider silk. I rather doubt micropipets could do the job either - I've gotten the impression that the spinnerets are an extremely sophisticated protein-manipulation org
Re:wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually invested money into the now dissolved Canadian company, Nexia Biotechnologies, which was the first to do the spider-goats. You are entirely correctly. Spinning the silk is the harder second part. The gains in reducing cost per meter couldn't keep the pace with similar gains in carbon nanotubes, which competed for many of the same practical applications. Nexia's first path to market was to be superstrong medical sutures. At first, the FDA promised expensive human trials would not be needed since the proteins were naturally occurring. When the FDA later about-faced, it was Game Over for Nexia, who sold the IP rights to a company in Virginia. They also sold the IP behind their proven anti-chemical warfare agents. But the tyrants of the world never used chemical warfare against the US military, so that was (thankfully) also a financial bust.
Nexia was also trying to GMO a plant crop that could grow the silk protein in their leaves. After harvesting, the leaves would be grinded and sifted. However, you're still back to the same Spinning Problem that you highlighted.
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One solution might be to re-purpose other tech from the bio-tech industry.
Specifically, hollow silicon nanoneedle arrays.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
Grown with the correct length, diameter, and taper, they would function as mechanical analogues to spider spinnarettes. Wet one side, then "brush" the other to get the thread started-- then just gently tug on the resulting fibers.
They would be very fragile things though. Would take very specialized equipment to handle, install, and prime them for service.
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Pores probably wouldn't do it either - spider spinnerets are fairly sophisticated protein-manipulation organs, they don't just squirt the protein through a sufficiently small nozzle.
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Short of growing spinnarets on a tissue sheet from cultured spider cells, (which would give the exact organs needed), there is no way to fully replicate the features of a spider's spinnaret at this time.
According to , the processes that transform the spinning dope from an disordered liquid crystal solution to insoluble fibers involves mechanical compression coupled with saline ion removal, and that the rate of draw from the spinning duct has a profound correlation with the tensility of the resulting fibers. [intechopen.com]
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Nexia Biotechnologies, which was the first to do the spider-goats.
A bit of trivia:
A friend who was in-the-know claimed George W. Bush wore a spider-goat bullet proof vest during at least part of his presidency. FWIW he worked within the security establishment in Washington DC, but I have no way to verify his claim.
I hope they remove the Sticky! (Score:3)
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Your typical spider produces many different kinds of silk, I don't think anyone is trying to replicate the sticky kind, generally they want the super-strong dragline silk.
Spidergoats (Score:2)
Spidergoats?
Damn, I can think of one Homer J. Simpson that's jealous as hell.
All he has is a lame spiderpig. That's soooo 2007.
Does anybody here watch/follow Frankenstein M.D.? (Score:1)
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Silksteel alloys (Score:2)
Until quite recently, spider silk had the highest tensile strength of any substance known to man, and the name silksteel pays homage to the arachnid for good reason.
-- Comissioner Pravin Lal ,"U.N. Scientific Survey"
News? (Score:3)
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It's even older than that. Here's an article on the subject dating back to 1998. [eurekalert.org] Jeffrey Turner was one of the early pioneers of this research, and co-founded a company, Nexia Biotechnologies, to commercialize the idea in 1993. [wikipedia.org] I swear these "spider goat" articles have been popping up several times a year for the last fifteen years in various media outlets.
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SPIDER MAN IS REAL!!!!!!!! (Score:1)
Pick a date (Score:1)
So, it's now scientifically directly false to claim that all observable biological features can be explained without reference to design.
Looking for a proposed date at which we know design did not happen before then, to be able to make a -qualified- statement of explanation via evolutionary processes, that is, knowing the mainstream causal factors given, e.g. in classrooms, is simply, provably, scientifically false.
What date do you like, before which we have evidence to assert biological design did not happ
Spider Goat. (Score:1)
Spider Goat was a failure. (Score:2)
Search for the spider goats in Google News. Last I saw they could extract the silk proteins from the milk but weren't able to combine them, they ended up with a big pile of the proteins and no way to weave them into silk. Though I believe they're still working on it there isn't high hope they will succeed. That's why they've begun talking about using silk worms, they are easy to setup (it's been done for centuries) and harvest silk and have they already have the necesary biological systems necessary to spin
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GMO=Genetic holocaust (Score:2)
This GMO stuff just keeps getting more creepy, freaky and frankensteinish. We need to ban this stuff before it causes a global ecological disaster and wrecks the planets environment or turns the place into a monstrous wasteland of deformed beasts and poisonous, cancer causing food. The dangers of GMOs have been well documented by others, including the cancer causing potential, such as in Jeff Smith's book.
Still working on it (Score:2)