Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[Money4Nothing-M4N]

Coding genes for Dragon Silk

News recently hit the presses highlighting Kraig Biocraft Laboratories’ memorandum of understanding with Vietnam, which represents the foundations of the two collaborating to use transgenic silk worms to finally mass-produce in a cost-effective way spider silk – a remarkable fibre with numerous performance qualities.

Like many other companies, Kraig Labs is reliant on genetic engineering for its products, but while other manufacturers have chosen different hosts for their work, such as bacteria and goats, this company is betting on the silk worm for an efficient process, calling it ‘nature’s silk factory’.

According to the company, genetic engineering offers a great deal of potential for the manufacturing this fibre, allowing for the manipulation of its characteristics in order to enhance certain functions for different end products and applications.

While cracking the mass production of spider silk itself would be a big feat for the industry, Kraig Labs is already setting itself up for the next big steps – refining and developing the product. According to COO Jon Rice, the demand for all different functionalities and possibilities is evident in the synthetics industry, so Kraig Labs is already working to add more products to its portfolio.

The developer of advanced spider silk based fibres, has created its strongest and most flexible recombinant spider silk technology yet, Dragon Silk.

Dragon Silk represents a leap in the company’s recombinant spider silk technology, combining both the elasticity and strength elements of native spider silk. A small number of samples of the new fibre have demonstrated tensile strength as high as 1.79 gigapascals, exceeding widely reported spider silk strength (by as much as 37%, depending on source literature), Kraig Labs said. Several samples of Dragon Silk have also demonstrated elasticity above 38%, exceeding native dragline spider silk, the company added.

This new material has shown it can be more flexible than Monster Silk and stronger than Big Red, the company’s flagship recombinant spider silk products. Kraig Labs is now working to standardise the performance level across the entire Dragon Silk genetic line.

Company founder and CEO Kim Thompson said: “We have never believed that native spider silk is the limit of strength and flexibility performance. A few superstar individuals, within the genetically engineered colony we call Dragon Silk, have demonstrated extremely high level of performance in the laboratory. We are now working to obtain that standard throughout the Dragon Silk line.

“Even as we undertake that work, our research team is working in parallel to create even more powerful transgenics. Dragon Silk represents yet another material science breakthrough and shifts the standard of performance expectation for spider silk technologies,” he added.

http://www.wtin.com/article/2015/june/29615/coding-genes-for-dragon-silk/?channelId=1120