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Synthetic Spider Silk & Morphogen Gradients

This Week in Synthetic Biology (Issue #12)

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Synthetic Spider Silk (Review)

Every once in awhile, a review comes along that makes me fall in love (again). I’ve always been intrigued by synthetic spider silk, but a review from Eriko Takano’s group, at the University of Manchester, has taken my obsession to new heights. This new review explores all the wondrous ways that living organisms — including, but not limited to, spiders — can be coaxed into producing synthetic silk. Takano and the other authors offer an exciting scientific journey through the challenges of producing, and harvesting, silk spidroin proteins from Salmonella bacteria, mammalian cells, rice (!), other plants (including Nicotiana tabacum) and even mice. I didn’t know that so many different critters could produce silk, nor did I understand just how big of a factor pH plays in the silk spinning process within a spider’s glands. This review, which is open access, was published in Trends in Biotechnology. Link