I'm assuming it's not sticky, otherwise you'd be covered in flies as you walked around.
Spiders spin a number of different kinds of silk, one is sticky and another is not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_web
Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
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Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#12Wow, just recently I was looking up all about spider silk, thinking we weren't utilizing it to its full potential - whether medical, military or even fashion. Very excited about this, though it will probably be extremely expensive.
Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#13Another company, Bolt Threads [1] just raised significant money [2] to produce spider silk as well. Started by a few molecular biologists, they too took it from a protein sequence, into yeast, purified the protein in bulk, spun it into thread, then wove it into a fabric. Which means, theoretically they can tweak the protein sequence to produce an entirely new fabric in a matter of a few weeks. Once you get a woven protein scaffold into a fabric, systematically modifying the scaffold further is relatively easy for a protein compared with the sugars and polymers we use currently.
It's hard to see unless you look closely, but this is the beginning of biological nanotechnology. These are some of the very first deliberately designed biological molecules to make it into a non-pharmaceutical market. Technologically, the silks in these fabrics are made of designed components an order of magnitude smaller than Intel's best transistors. And (under biological conditions) are significantly more functionally versatile.
[1] https://boltthreads.com/ [2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/04/spiderpants/
Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#14I love it when promises of sci-fi from my youth become real.
Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#15Wow, just recently I was looking up all about spider silk, thinking we weren't utilizing it to its full potential - whether medical, military or even fashion. Very excited about this, though it will probably be extremely expensive.
All new breakthroughs start expensive, though. Not until economies of scale come in does the price get driven down.
Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#16Another company, Bolt Threads [1] just raised significant money [2] to produce spider silk as well. Started by a few molecular biologists, they too took it from a protein sequence, into yeast, purified the protein in bulk, spun it into thread, then wove it into a fabric. Which means, theoretically they can tweak the protein sequence to produce an entirely new fabric in a matter of a few weeks. Once you get a woven pr…
I can't find any information on the protein they're using - do you know which it is?
From a proteonomics perspective it seems interesting, but spider silk is several different proteins polymerized into amorphous semi-elastic regions, so I'm skeptical about their 'spinning' process.
Processes using yeast to produce simple proteins (like hypoallergenic insulin) have been around since the 1980s, so I'm curious about how (or if) they solved the protein folding problem and stats on how their silk compares to natural silk.
Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#17I saw a talk a few years ago by a German company that was essentially trying to do the same thing. I forgot the name of the company, but I remembered they said that expressing the proteins is the easy part. Spinning the proteins into a thread was the tough part. Apparently spiders have special excretion structures/organs that can anneal the proteins to the right conformation extremely quickly as they are ejected. This is why a spider can basically just jump off of anything and shoot out his "bungee cord" while falling which is incredibly fast if you think about it. When the researchers tried to replicate this by simply shooting the concentrated protein solution through a tiny capillary they weren't able to achieve the same molecular structure for their thread nor at the same speed. They noted that their thread was strong, but nevertheless significantly weaker than a spider's. I'm very interested to know if these other companies managed to overcome these challenges and how exactly.
Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#18Another company, Bolt Threads [1] just raised significant money [2] to produce spider silk as well. Started by a few molecular biologists, they too took it from a protein sequence, into yeast, purified the protein in bulk, spun it into thread, then wove it into a fabric. Which means, theoretically they can tweak the protein sequence to produce an entirely new fabric in a matter of a few weeks. Once you get a woven pr…
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Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#19Another company, Bolt Threads [1] just raised significant money [2] to produce spider silk as well. Started by a few molecular biologists, they too took it from a protein sequence, into yeast, purified the protein in bulk, spun it into thread, then wove it into a fabric. Which means, theoretically they can tweak the protein sequence to produce an entirely new fabric in a matter of a few weeks. Once you get a woven pr…
Wonderful comment, however I disagree with the "hard to see" aspect... I'm so excited about this tech that when reading the article I was daydreaming of dropping everything and just showing up on the doorstep of a company like spiber and saying "I am not leaving until you give me a job"
This is awesome tech and the obvious future. So I don't think it is hard to see at all...
Re: Moon Parka: Outerwear Made from Synthetic Spider Silk
#20Spider silk is extremely vulnerable to flame though... I'm not sure if that is mostly related to just how thin it is... But I would like to see a comparison between this fabric and nylon when near open flame. Nylon will melt, what will this do?