Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[jazz710]

This is correct: All single-celled organisms are not the same. E. coli (bacteria) is a prokaryotic organism and has a very different underlying translation machinery than S. cerevisiae (yeast/fungus). As a eukaryote, yeast is cable of much more complex protein synthesis.

This often gets glossed over as many people refer to all single celled organisms as 'bacteria', but this is not accurate. The following reposted from elsewhere:

I greatly appreciate the vote of confidence, but my expertise is in genetics and I don't have much first-hand knowledge about what's on the cutting edge of recombinant microbiology.

Your points as stated, fit with the current narrative regarding the vat producers: High amounts of 'waste material' relative to desired product. I think that the results thus far for companies like Bolt Threads speak for themselves. If they were able to scale up at the moment, they wouldn't have made only a handful of ties. I truly believe that the vat producers will not be able to match fiber yields with the likes of KBLB, and will likely find their niche in supplying the purified protein for integration into other types of products (ie. Amsilk and their beauty products).

When push comes to shove, once the silkworms reach homozygosity, which I'm sure that ours have and is easy to check/achieve with the right checks in place, that they will do as nature has programmed them to do: Make fiber. That's the real benefit of the animal system vs. yeast/bacteria. The worms output our raw product, which can (with slight modifications) be treated like normal silk for all intents and purposes. The vat producers can do all of the optimization that they want, but the fact of the matter is that their raw product is protein in solution. While it can be artificially spun into a product, they have to put a lot more into their system than we do cost-wise. We have the worms, we're tweaking the silk processing parameters, and at that point, our main input to the system is mulberry leaves or pellets.

I'm sorry I can't be more directly helpful regarding your specific questions, but I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge where my direct experience lies (the genetic modification process itself).