Hi Jazz,
I respect your opinions a lot but I believe you may be wrong on this.
I have thought about this quite a bit and I believe for producing large amounts of liquid silk protein, dissolving the silk cocoons or fiber is much easier and cost effective. That is why David Kaplan uses this method for producing liquid silk proteins for all his experiments he does instead of using the fermentation method.
There are ways to dissolve silk from a fiber without breaking down the structure of the protein, therefore not compromising the mechanical properties that liquid silk is used for.
This is one of the reason why I don't agree with the notion that companies like Bolt Threads and Spiber will find a niche in the liquid silk protein arena.
liquid silk could even be cheaper than silk fibers one day. If you think about it, the expensive part of creating silk is mostly the labor intensive reeling process. If Kraig Labs wanted to make liquid protein, they could just wait for the moths to emerge then throw the cacoons in a bath to dissolve. Or, the less humane way, once the worms are big enough, throw them all in a blender and centrifuge out the proteins since the silk gland inside is 30-40% of their body weight and already liquid.
Regardless, I've discussed this with you elsewhere and I feel we agree that scale up for mass production of proteins using fermentation is cost prohibitive (and not even close). It works for the biotech industry because the proteins they make are very valuable. 250 grams of a protein used for pharmaceuticals is much more valuable then a shirt that was made with 250 grams of a protein using the same fermentation process. I've discussed this with a couple scientists at Thermofisher and they agree.
Anyways, just my 2 cents. Thanks
-GT
