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Replies to post #126111 on Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)
i doubt it's intended to be the mother of all fibers..
Scientists at the Natick facility are well-known for their expertise in high-performance fiber application development and their deployment of superior military, and often civilian, systems. The Natick Soldier Center has been working with Nexia under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) since May 1999 and the results are reported jointly in the Science paper.
"These results are remarkable," said Costas N. Karatzas, PhD, Vice-President, Research & Development at Nexia. "First, we were able to produce monomers and spin fibers in an aqueous environment thereby mimicking the spider's way of spinning silk, a process that has been perfected through 400 million years of evolution. Using these water-based BioSteel® solutions for large-scale fiber spinning would be con-siderably more environmentally friendly than using harsh solvents such as those used for most synthetic fiber manufacturing.
"Second, the material from mammalian cells was spun into fibers with significant toughness. Scientists have been successful in producing spider silk proteins in bacteria and yeast in the past, but for a number of reasons, have been unable to spin fibers with appreciable properties. Now with the availability of mammalian-derived BioSteel® fibers, we can begin to optimize the spinning process in order to tailor BioSteel® properties for a wide range of applications. We are grateful to the US Army team at Natick and our other collaborators for their expert guidance in this project," added Dr. Karatzas.
Dragline silk, which comprises the radiating spokes of a spider web, exhibits a combination of strength and toughness unmatched by high-performance synthetic fibers. Dragline silk is three times tougher than aramid fibers and five times as strong, by weight, as steel. Dragline silk is composed of proteins with multiple repetitive sequence blocks that impart its mechanical properties. Spiders can be coaxed to make silk, but attempts to create "spider farms" have failed because of the territorial nature of spiders.
BioSteel® is eco-friendly both in terms of its composition and its production process. As opposed to most other synthetic fibers, BioSteel® is expected to be biodegradable over time in the presence of water making it a promising material for such applications as medical sutures and fishing lines. Additionally, the aqueous production process has the potential to be non-polluting and environmentally friendly in contrast to the manufacturing of other synthetic fibers.
"It's incredible that a tiny animal found literally in your backyard can create such an amazing material by using only amino acids, the same building blocks that are used to make skin and hair," added Dr. Turner. "Spider silk is a material science wonder - a self-assembling, biodegradable, high-performance, nanofiber structure one-tenth the width of a human hair that can stop a bee traveling at 20 miles per hour without breaking. Spider silk has dwarfed Man's achievements in material science to date."
Nexia has exclusive, worldwide rights to broad patents covering spider silks genes and proteins and is in the process of developing commercial quantities of spider silk using its proprietary transgenic goat technology. Nexia has developed a number of male and female BioSteel® founder goats. Males are being used to expand the herd and females will begin producing milk in the second quarter 2002 to provide increasing quantities of BioSteel® for spinning process optimization, product development and commer-cialization.
