Cow Used in Man-Made Spider Web
By Charles Mandel
Jan. 18, 2002
MONTREAL -- A Montreal biotech company and the U.S. Army say they've
developed the first man-made spider silk, made from mammal cell cultures
of a cow, with properties similar to the real thing.
Nexia's BioSteel fibers
http://www.nexiabiotech.com/HTML/investor/archive.shtml will be used
for commercial products such as medical sutures, biodegradable fishing
lines and soft body armor. Nexia and the Army jointly published their
ground-breaking research Thursday in the journal Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/ .
Researchers have successfully produced spider silk proteins in bacteria
and yeast in the past, but haven't been able to spin fibers with
properties comparable to a spider's, according to Nexia.
And while spiders can be coaxed to make silk, attempts to create "spider
farms" have failed because of the territorial nature of the arachnids.
The researchers took a solution of proteins, forced them through a
small-diameter hole into a solution of water and methanol, and watched
as they spontaneously assembled into fiber, said Mark Kaufmann, a Nexia
vice president.
"Mimicking spider silk properties has been the holy grail of material
science for a long time," Nexia CEO Jeffrey Turner said in a statement.
The research team used genes derived from two different species of
orb-weaving spiders. Their dragline silks are one of the strongest
documented.
Dragline silk makes up the radiating spokes of a spider web and is five
times as strong, by weight, as steel. "It's incredible that a tiny
animal found literally in your backyard can create such an amazing
material," Turner said.
"Spider silk is a material science wonder," Turner said. "A
self-assembling, biodegradable, high-performance, nanofiber structure
one-tenth the width of a human hair that can stop a bee traveling at 20
mph without breaking."
However, during a webcast Thursday, Turner said that Nexia has a ways to
go before the filament is as strong as they'd like. So while the company
anticipates developing its fishing line in the next year, soft body
armor -- a specific interest of the Army -- is still some time off.
The armor is the Army's main interest, according to Kaufmann. The
properties written about in the Science article, he said, are not
appropriate for body armor. Whether they can optimize the fiber to have
the strength is the big challenge. "It's a fairly difficult development
time-line, so I imagine it wouldn't be in the short-term; but if we were
to get the right properties this year, it could be 18 to 20 months,"
Kaufmann said.
The theory, Kaufmann says, is that the armor would be lighter weight,
more flexible and more effective. And it would likely be looked at in
combination with the other high-performance fibers on the market right
now, such as kevlar.
Nexia's breakthrough began in January 2000, not with cows, but with the
development of Webster and Peter, two goats confirmed to carry a single
spider silk gene in their genetic makeup of 70,000 goat genes.
The two goats have sired some 50 diary goats for the production of silk
proteins in their milk. Nexia's technology relies on the anatomical
similarity between the spider silk gland and goat mammary glands. In
both cases, epithelial, or surface, cells manufacture and secrete water
soluble complex proteins in large amounts.
Currently, Nexia has only produced the silk by using cell cultures but
has shown it can produce the protein in the milk of the goats. The firm
has not yet publicly discussed the ability to spin the goat milk protein
into spider silk fibers, Kaufmann said.
The research was initially done in cow cell lines in order to predict
whether the proteins could be produced in milk. But Nexia says goats
will produce the proteins in a large amount in a shorter period. "We
could use cows. Goats are generally quicker, meaning that they have a
shorter period between when they're born and when they lactate,"
Kaufmann said. Nexia uses a special breed of goat called Breed Early,
Lactate Early.
Turner said about 100 goats are needed for medical device production,
and 1,000 goats are needed for industrial material production. He also
said the company needs to move from producing one filament at a time to
making many simultaneously and quickly.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,49828,00.html
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