Contribution

We believe that spider silk may be a fantastic material in the future despite the fact that it cannot be produced in large amounts. Our project aims at genetically modifying E.coli so they can produce a large amount of spider silk for different industries to use. We would find out the effectiveness and efficiency of the formation of spider silk from different liquid spridroin concentrations. We also design a proto-type set-up to collect spider silk from liquid spridroin effectively.

Besides, by adjusting the amount of different types and concentration of spidroin, we can control the properties like the elasticity and hardness of silk we produce, so as to cater the different needs . We sincerely hope that this biosynthetic fibroin will help in saving our mother nature by replacing the current materials frequently used which can cause serious pollutants and other threats to the environment and enhance the quality of people’ life./p>

Moreover, we are glad to share the data we found or produced in our project with other teams, such as the minimum IPTG concentration and spridroin concentration enough for expression and formation of the spider silk respectively. Our team also provides a framework of proportional co-expression system as a platform to variate the percentage of different spiderions to reduce the time for post-expression treatment.

Also, NT-2Rep-CT-SpyTag, a modification of NT-2Rep-CT was designed. NT-2 Rep-CT (BBa_K3264000) is a common mini-sprodroin used in many other iGEM teams. A SpyTag is added in the end and two restriction sites are added in both ends of the NT-2Rep-CT gene. NT-2Rep-CT-SpyTag can be functionalized with various SpyCatcher-fused proteins to bind with different proteins for different purposes. Unfortunately, we don't have much time for the wet lab part because of the regulation of covid-19. We hope this gene can help future iGEM teams to add more functions on spridroin.

Despite the countless errors and limitations in our project, we enjoyed different limitations and the processes of finding solutions to them. We appreciated the help and genuine support from other iGEM teams and experts in the field. We truly believe that the difficulties we have will polish our project and finally turn stone into gold.