Human Practice Overview
Bio-ink, string, bio-concrete are three major parts we are working on.We have communicated with different stakeholders with their opinion towards our products. Besides, education is one of our main focuses on human practice. We hold booths with schoolmates who are passionate in biotechnology to develop their interest in biotechnology.
Aim and purpose of our project
First and foremost,due to its extraordinary elasticity and stretchability, spider silk has a tremendous potential for making artificial ligaments and tendons for patients who are suffering from the disease. We hope that the patients can get an opportunity to regain a normal life and to bring a bright future to them
Besides, we have an idea of making a combined concrete by using bio-concrete and spider silk such that the concrete could withstand the damage at different extents. We believe that spider silk could have tightened the concrete together to avoid concrete spalling and to stabilize the structure once damage to the structure has occurred. Our combined concrete can act as a protector to ensure that citizens can temporarily stay in a relatively stable environment to wait for rescue teams when there are natural hazards and minimize the death caused by the natural hazards.
On the other hand, the current strings for musical instruments are not biodegradable, thus the amount of strings going into the landfill every year is enormous. Furthermore, the strings which are widely used today are not produced in an environmentally-friendly manner. Hence, the environment has to bear a greater burden. We believe that with the tunable and biodegradable properties of spider silk, we could have made spider silk fitting all kinds of needs and the silk itself could even be tailor made to fit custom requests, while alleviating the burden of both landfill and Mother Nature.
Human Practice Cycle
Bio-ink
Originally, we planned to develop spider silk we expressed into a type of bioink, which can be used to print the organs like ligament and tendon for patients. As the tensile strength of spider silk is extremely high, it is about 8.34GPa, much higher than gelatin (hydrogel) which is the common bioink.
After consulting a professor from the University of Science and technology, Professor Sun Fei, and his students, we ceased for the biosipider-ink part. As spider silk is too sticky and viscous, it may stick to the tip of the printer leading to the malfunctioning of the printer. Also, the protein cannot be solidified immediately which leads to the structure of the object to be printed being affected. Moreover, the idea puts the car in front of the horse. As we have expressed proteins already, it is unreasonable that we alter the protein into bio-ink for printing organs, why don't we directly produce the tissue needed? As a result, we try the other domain of our project,which are string and biospider-concrete.
String
After consulting an experienced and talented guitar player and the organizer of Summer Unit, which is one the local registered music organizations, concerns were raised.The density of spider silk and a string are totally different.This affects the striking between particles and hence affecting the speed of sound.The sound will travel faster or slower than usual string even if the parameter is the same as the current string.
Besides, the organizer of the music organization also pointed out that the extraditionary elasticity of spider silk could actually be an obstacle in replacing the current string. He believes that high elasticity of spider silk string will lead to the fact that violin, viola and all the other stringed musical instruments will have to be tuned every single time before playing, which is not user friendly.
In light of this,we raised an idea on twisting multiple strings into one. We can modify the string by looking at the structure of the ukulele string. We can use pyriform,a type of spider silk, and surround numerous spider silk out of the pyriform. With the properties of pyriform, we believe that an extremely hard silk inside the string and surrounded by some elastic spider silk can tackle the problem of the extraordinary elasticity.
As science and technology should be good for humans, user friendly is also another point of consideration for us. Thus, we have come up with a solution to solve it through the proportional expression. As proportional expression could inherit multiple benefits of different silks into 1 silk, we have decided to use pyriform as one of the silk to make strings. Pyriform is one of the hardest silk among all the silk that a spider could have produced, thus could lower the overall elasticity of the proportionally expressed silk and hence be able to fit the expectation of the player that the string is user friendly.
They both agree that with the incredible tensile strength and stretchability of spider silk have the numerous potential to replace the normal string by controlling the proportion of different spidroin.The also appreciate our idea on using spider silk as a string.It could even make new sweet-sunding timbre.
They have also mentioned that due to the pandemic, global shipping is severely impacted. Hence there is a lack of raw materials for the strings, which have led to the decreasing supply of strings. Some special types of strings have already sold out and customers will have to wait for 1 year before the replenishment of the stocks. Unlike traditional strings, our spider silk strings could have maintained a stable supply as the plant size for producing spider silk is smaller than the traditional strings and we require fewer raw materials than traditional strings. Thus we are likely to maintain a stable supply despite the development of the pandemic.
However they have also pointed out that the proportionally expressed spider silk could have affected the timbre and the speed of sound. As proportionally expressed spider silk is made up of at least 2 types of silks and they have different density, thus the speed of sound could have been affected, and hence the timbre of the musical instruments. Unfortunately, we do not have sufficient time to carry out a test on how different density of the proportionally expressed silk could have affected the timbre. However we believe that with trial and error of testing the proportion of different silk, a silk that could solve this problem could eventually be found. We hope that we can answer this question in the next year.
Bio-concrete
We have tried to contact different stakeholders that are related to bio-concrete, however until the wiki freeze, we haven’t received any response from 21 companies or laboratories.