why this PR is being misinterpreted by some IMHO:
"a lot of variability, which may be an indication of genetic variation within the transgenic colony" does not appear to be good, at first glance. For high tech products, consistency is critical. This is particularly true in products where strength is very important as it will be for most of KBLB's anticipated applications for it's fibers: a small localized inconsistency can lead to product failure. But there is a lot more to this than meets the eye.
Big Red was done by genetically transforming the Large Commercial Silkworm line, which is a standard commercial breed that should have had very little genetic variation (in contrast to MS in which the genetic transformations were done on a wild type worm with high genetic variation). In addition the genetic modifications that created Big Red were all done using SGMO's zinc finger technology which makes genetic changes at exactly the targeted location (in contrast to the piggyBac transposon used to make the GMs in MS which made random transformations). So genetic variability may seem surprising.
The explanation may be that the genetic consistency in the Large Commercial Worm (LCW) may be mainly in the sequence that is important in silk characteristics and production and there might be significant variability in the rest of its genome (which actually would be a good thing). IF that suspicion is correct then the problem may be that a few genetic variations that don't affect gene production for ordinary silk are highly important in the production of silk containing spider silk proteins. In fact, there are very good reasons why that is highly likely to be the case: spider silk protein has a very unusual structure that consists almost entirely of just two amino acids, leading to an exceptionally high demand for those two AA's. Since the weight of a cocoon plus worm is about 50% the cocoon and the cocoon is almost entirely the major spider silk proteins, even though the percentage of spider silk protein in KBLB's silks is low (about 15% in MS, probably similar in Big Red) nevertheless the demand for those two essential amino acids would be many times higher than in the production of normal silk (there are 20 EAAs and ordinarily the demand for those two AAs would be many times smaller).
I had previously speculated that the rapid increases in the reproduction rate in MS as it entered commercial level production may have been due to epistatic changes (inheritable changes in the genome due to changes other than in the DNA sequence that could be inherited (nucleotide methylation, etc) as the wild type genes in the MS worms adjusted to the production conditions. That is probably at least partially true. But far more significant may be that with each production generation selection was taking place that removed genetic variations that were unfavorable for the metabolism of far larger amounts than normal of those two amino acids. Since detrimental variations would have resulted in poorer cocoons and with each generation, the poor quality worms would have been discarded in the normal course of ramping up the population to commerical levels, such very rapid adaptive changes would not be at all surprising. (It took only a few generations of such selective breeding to domesticate the fox in a well know Russian experiment.)
It would be expected that the same thing would occur naturally during the ramping up of the Big Red population. I suspect that KBLB has figured out that this is what's been going on and that their acquisition of this testing equipment was intended, at least in part, to assist in improving the selection process. Agriculture has shown that highly consistent results can be achieved this way and there is no reason to expect otherwise with KBLB's worms. Since silkworms have very short generations (about two months) and remarkable and very powerful results can be achieved in just a few generations (as demonstrated by the Russian fox experiment and numerous others) there is every reason to expect KBLB's work with Big Red to be very successful at achieving a very high level of consistency and efficiency of production of it's silks.
This would explain KBLB's need to acquire it's own testing equipment rather than sending fibers to commercial sources for testing as this process would entail a vastly higher number of tests. It may be far cheaper to send it out when doing just a few tests on a new fiber but if the tests are part of a selective breeding process then in house equipment is absolutely essential.
IMHO it's quite reasonable to expect KBLB to be able to achieve consistent production of the highest levels tested in the current line of worms by the time it achieves commercial production of worms. For that reason I would take the highest test results achieved as a good indication of the quality of the end product under production.
As is almost always the case with biotechnology, the development is taking longer than expected and hoped for. But, in this case, it appears to be going well.
Note that unlike other methods for creating high strength fibers, it will not be necessary to build new factories to expand production. Existing sillkworm production facilities may be purchased and used largely as is. The limiting factor on the expansion of production then becomes the rate of expansion of the silkworm population which is up to 100X every two months - not much of a limiting factor. That, plus the far lower costs of production, will be major advantages for KBLB's approach to high tech fiber production.
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Note also that the need to modify the testing equipment to accommodate the unusual characteristics of KBLB's fiber explains why so much time passed after KBLB's acquisition of the new testing equipment without getting results. Such modification would not involve mere calibration but would require specially designed alterations. Standard equipment is designed for an expected range of properties and the qualities of KBLB's fiber, (especially the elasticity) would be very far outside the expected ranges. Such modifications would require design by mechanical engineers and testing of the designs to assure required performance. It is not at all unreasonable for this to have taken the time that it has.
As was clear in the PNAS study on Monster SIlk, some processing of the fiber is necessary to do these tests so it is not surprising that it may take a few weeks to do them. (Read the PNAS study and you'll see why it is not at all just a simple matter of attaching fiber to the machine and running the test.)
It would not, IMHO, be at all surprising for KBLB to discover/develop methods of processing to improve the properties of the fiber during this process. It would take little additional effort for the scientists to investigate possible approaches for improvements during this process and I expect they will be doing that.
I would expect within a few weeks of test results on properties of Big Red. For reasons noted above, the high end of the results would be a good indication of what would be achieved under production conditions. The worms producing that result would be selected for during the ramping up of the population to commercial production levels. (just as apparently done (in a less directed manner) during the ramping up of the MS population).
The above is cross posted from another site.
