Found a way to transform genes to create spider silk like Spider Man

If this research is scaled up, NASA could bring bacteria into future missions to space, to turn them into a source of new materials.

According to a report published in Phys.org, spider silk is stronger than steel but to produce spider silk is extremely difficult and expensive. However, mass production of this material if successful can produce super-powerful, very potential fabrics to create new generation astronaut suits.

The difficulty arises in the way traditional spider silk is produced when the spiders need to take silk to make silk together, they tend to eat each other.

It is very difficult to produce spider silk in the traditional way.(Photo: Sciencealert).

Instead, growing bacteria to produce spider silk is much easier and more productive. However, bacteria do not like spider silk and also ."refuse" to create them. Common strains of bacteria used to make materials from organic or inorganic waste eliminate the silk-forming gene.

"In nature, there are a lot of protein-based materials that exhibit incredible mechanics, but the supply of these materials is often limited , " said Fuzhong Zhang, a researcher at the University of Washington. "We not only want to create new materials but also want to improve it better based on microbiological engineering research."

To overcome the limitations of bacteria, scientists cut genes that make spider silk into small parts, then re-assemble and integrate into the bacterial genome. The study was published at the 2019 Spring Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Cross section of the bacterial gene has the ability to produce spider silk.(Photo: Phys.org).

With the above method, the scientists made two grams of spider silk with each liter of the grafted bacterium, which is of real silk quality from a spider.

2 grams is quite less than having to feed a large amount of bacteria. Anyway, this is still a big improvement compared to other efforts in mass production of silk.

If this research is scaled up, NASA could bring bacteria into future missions to space, to turn them into a source of new materials.

• Manufacturing artificial spider silk: many useful applications in the future
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