Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[GTman1]

Once again, a University lab is producing proteins found in nature using well developed techniques for protein fermentation. This time it's Cornell University, and the target protein is keratin.

Nothing new. This team seems to be about where Bolt Threads was in 2008-2010, and where Randy lewis (and even Amsilk) was in about 2006. Those efforts never became fruitful because the product is much too expensive to produce. Someone even posted a paper on the economics behind this process. Here's a link:

Utah State-Edlund paper

This new initiative with Cornell University will see the same fate as the past failures of protein fermentation for fibers. The process for obtaining target proteins using fermentation has been around for almost 4 decades, and has never yielded a protein that was commercially viable as a fiber for clothing.

Interestingly though, this new paper focuses on keratin. Some of Kraig Labs newest patent applications focus on replacing the sericin protein with keratin. Functionally producing keratin as a waste product in the production of spider silk. Furthermore, this keratin protein would be suspended in water, which would be much easier to separate and purify, than the minimal amounts suspended in a fermentation medium consisting of thousands of other proteins along with lysed cellular debris.