Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

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Technological game changers: Tough as silk
Posted: Monday, September 1, 2014 12:00 am
By Johanna Royo

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It sounds too outrageous to be legit - spider genes transplanted into silkworms that then spin cocoons of stronger-than-steel spider silk.

To understand spider silk, you have to first understand regular silk. Silkworms, primarily the mulberry variety, produce silk as they spin their cocoon. It takes 3,000 cocoons to make one pound of silk yarn. Or 17 pounds of cocoon per one pound of silk. It's a lot, but the silkworms are pretty efficient. More efficient than spiders.

Spiders spin fiber that is stronger than steel and tougher than the material used to make body armor, five times tougher than Dupont's Kevlar, but lighter. The only problem is, spiders don't make very much very fast. So the match made in heaven - at EntoGenetics labs in Charlotte, to be precise - is to put the gene for making spider fiber in a busy little silkworm.

"It is significantly tougher that Kevlar," says Jake Long, director of business development at EntoGenetics. "We're expecting spider silk body armor to be about half the weight."

This is important because lighter weight body armor means greater maneuverability and the ability to put armor in currently unprotected places. Like ballistic underwear.

According to Long, EntoGenetics isn't the first to try to streamline the process of harvesting spider silk, but it is the first to hit pilot level production. The company recently received a small research and development grant from the Army.

"The military is really where we are hoping to build our business," Long said.

At EntoGenetics' sericulture operation, employees are rearing silkworms and growing mulberry trees. They harvest the thread and spin it into fabric.

In the lab, scientists are carefully transferring silk genes from several species of orb-weaving spiders to the mulberry silkworms. This changes the ingredient that the worm uses to produce its silk.

"We are working on breeding our own elite lines and hybrids," Long said. Think the special operators of the silkworm world.

Those genetically altered silkworms breed young that spin spider silk.

Long says this may sound new and novel, but it's not. In the past 25 years, various branches of the military have doled out nearly $6 million for spider silk research.

Long says in the seven years since EntoGenetics started, it has successfully created a system for large-scale, inexpensive spider silk production from the common silkworm. That's not a tangled web, that's legit.

According to Long, EntoGenetics isn't the first to try to streamline the process of harvesting spider silk, but it is the first to hit pilot level production.

Really?




TRUTH