I really like todays news.
First, the 2 new strains have already been delivered in the first quarter of 2023 as promised. And as the company likes to sit on news, this info might already be weeks old.
But mostly, I like the explanation of how they are cross breeding to create hybrids. I've always suspected that this was going to be a necessary method in order to secure our IP and prevent theft of our technology (at least it makes it much harder). Hybridization has it's benefits because you can get the best traits out of a line the passes to all the offspring, and in this case, you get offspring that are infertile. This means that prodigy hands over the eggs to the third-party contractor, but the contractor can't breed them because they are all infertile.
You can almost think of it the way a mule is made. You breed a horse with a donkey which gives you a large working animal that is infertile.
Like I said, I always suspected that this was the best way to keep out lines secure and it looks like thats what the company is doing.
I also liked this PR because it confirms that these silkworms are all still producing the same mechanical properties as their dragonsilk line. A line that they reported to measure at an ultimate tensile strength of over 2GPa. And the silkworm size is the same as regular commercial silkworms. It sounds like the 4-strain will be introduced later once we are already producing with our 2-strain lines. The 4-strain will likely include traits for the even larger (50% larger than normal commercial silkworms if I remember correctly).
All in all this is good news and it looks like they are getting this production started early in 2023
