bacteria can NOT produce Spider silk protein!
Hi Cee-it,
If you wish to debate intelligently on the merits of various approaches to producing protein based technical fibers, you need to do a Lot more reading about not just KBLB but also about their various would be competitors.
Your current argument is based upon assumptions of the cost of silk worm chow that are incorrect as are your assumptions about the cost of labor and the cost of environment.
But on the other side of your inequality comparison you are making even more widely inaccurate assumptions.
First and foremost of these is your assumption that bacteria or yeasts can produce "...proteins that are the same as spider proteins"
The major Spider drag line silk strength proteins, S1 and S2, are very high molecular weight polymers, MW in the thousands.
(This means that the full polymer protein is a very large very long chain molecule.)
Bacteria and yeasts are incapable of producing such high MW products simply because the single cell organism is not large enough to contain them nor does it have a sufficiently strong metabolism to produce them.
Normal bacterial products are in the range of 50 to 100 MW.
If you read some of the scientific papers behind Amsilk (not the advertising hype, the Science) you will discover that they had to enhance and tailor the metabolic pathways of their bacteria to be able to produce proteins similar to spidroin.
The best results as reported in these papers are a bacteria that can produce a protein similar to a fragment of spidroin up to 250 -> 450 base pairs long, approximately 1/10th the MW of true spidroin.
Since it is a very reasonable assumption that in such polymers fiber strength is proportional to MW (true for Kevlar, Spectra, nylon , all other such known) It can be assumed that the Strongest possible fiber that can be produced from such goo, "...depending on the conquest of spinning" as you so positively "spin" 5 years of failures by Amsilk, will still have only a fraction of the strength of real spider silk.
The silk worm, Bombyx mori, on the other hand is a large complex multicellular creature with 60% of its total body weight devoted to spinning silk.
Bombyx mori IS capable of producing the very high MW proteins of spider drag line silk and in fact has been altered by KBLB to do just that!
(And then it spins it into fiber for us!)
Mike L.
