Super Spider Silk
The extraordinary properties of spider silk are being well known to everyone recently. People always praise the wonderful characteristics of spider silk, like its excellent strength and stretchability, and want to make use of the silk to replace the current materials we are using to achieve different needs.
In fact, the properties of spider silk should not be ignored. For example, the tensile strength of spider silk is around 8.34GPa, which is 20 times higher than the carbon steel! Apart from the strength, the stretchability of the silk is also great, It can stretch up to 5 times its initial length! The most important point is, spider silk is a mixture of proteins which is biodegradable, unlike metal and plastic that may persist in the environment for hundreds of years and cause pollution, spider silk will degrade and cause no pollution to the environment. Spider silk is a definitely suitable material to cope with pollution and enhance the quality of the products.
But how can we get such a large amount of spider silk for mass production of different goods? Not being able to get an abundant amount of silk from spiders, people have to think of other solutions to produce spider silk, otherwise we may waste such an amazing material.
Inspired by production of insulin, we came up with an idea of genetically modifying E. coli so that the E. coli can synthesize large amounts of spider silk unstoppably and achieve mass production of the silk. In this project, E. coli BL21 is aimed to be engineered to produce a protein named spidroin, which is the basic unit of spider silk. Several spider silk genes are planned to be manufactured. In the future, the mechanical properties of silk products, like strength, will be adjusted by controlling the proportion of spidroin with different toughness and elasticity. Thus, we hope to obtain spidroin with different properties to cater to different needs, like as a string of musical instruments or as bio-concrete to stabilize the collapsing buildings, hence providing alternative materials for other goods.