Development of Synthetic Spider Silk Fibers for High Performance Applications.

摘要

The overall goal of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of synthetic production of high-performance spider silk fibers for use in next- generation automotives, aerospace, body and vehicle armor, ropes, webbing, and advanced composites. This requires creating a system for producing the protein- based material with sufficient efficiency that, scaled up, would be commercially viable. Using cutting edge techniques in synthetic biology (e.g. gene design and synthesis), we created multiple type and multiple size silk sequences for maximum expression in a scalable, high expression recombinant organism. We created laboratory scale quantities of silk protein feedstock to determine the feasibility of synthetic spider silk production for commercial uses.