Amazing Artificial Spider Silk

FOR YEARS, MATERIALS scientists have been trying to figure out a way to give consumers broad access to the benefits of spider silk. As a naturally occurring supermaterial, spider silk is five times stronger than steel and more elastic than rubber bands, which suggests some amazing potential use cases, including bulletproof vests, biodegradable water bottles, and flexible bridge suspension ropes. But so far, every group that’s attempted to produce enough of the stuff to bring it to the mass market, from researchers to giant corporations, has pretty much failed.

The issue is there's no real way to get the silk from arachnids themselves—animals known to be regional and inhuman, which doesn't fit bringing them up in gatherings. So individuals have needed to fall back on imaginative workarounds. They've taken a stab at raising hereditarily designed silkworms, or embeddings qualities into microorganisms to express the required creepy crawly silk protein. These endeavors, be that as it may, have seen little achievement. Arachnid silk protein is mind boggling, and notwithstanding when experimenters can make filaments, these turn out so fine that totally new turning frameworks should be concocted sans preparation to transform the strands into string. It doesn't keep bunches from attempting however, and at regular intervals or somewhere in the vicinity, it appears, news of some creepy crawly silk leap forward circulates around the web, just to calm down following a couple of months. Also, buyers continue holding up.

fibers can even be tuned to possess different properties on demand: the researchers simply change the protein sequence.

But today, after five years of quiet operation, a startup called Bolt Threads has emerged to claim it’s made meaningful progress on the challenge. The Emeryville, California-based company grew out of the graduate school studies of three scientists from the University of California, San Francisco and UC Berkeley, and it has raised $40 million so far from such notable investors as Foundation Capital, Formation 8 and Founders Fund, as well as from government grants from institutions like the National Science Foundation. If its founders are to be believed, Bolt Threads may have solved the mystery—finally—of how to make spider silk commercially plausible.

“Basically, our mission from the beginning was to make a scalable amount of spider silk and bring that to consumers,” CEO Dan Widmaier tells WIRED. “It’s a problem that’s been around for a long time, and has been hampered entirely by technical challenges.”

Widmaier knows it’s a bold claim. That’s why, he says, the company chose to fly under the radar for so long. “We decided to keep our heads down and try to solve the problem before we went out and started talking about all the cool things we can do with the technology,” he says. “Now, we’re ready to say we’re here.”

Making Spider Silk Without Spiders

Widmaier says that generally speaking, what they do isn’t new in the world of biotechnology. The scientists genetically engineered a microorganism that can yield large quantities of silk protein through a yeast fermentation process—not just grams of silk protein, but metric tons. Then, using a proprietary mechanical system, a wet silk protein solution is manually squeezed through small extrusion holes and goes into a liquid bath that turns the stuff into solid fibers. While Widmaier won’t give away the minute specifications of how it all works, he does say that the extrusion process mimics the behavior of a spider’s spinneret—its silk-spinning organ. The naturally occurring spinning process has been the other key problem would-be spider silk producers have had difficulty mimicking in the past.

The result, Widmaier claims, is a technology that can artificially recreate the remarkably strong protein fibers spiders make. On top of that, he says, the fibers can even be tuned to possess different properties on demand: the researchers simply change the protein sequence on the platform to tweak the qualities of the material according to preference. Widmaier says they can make spider silk that’s stronger, stretchier, or waterproof, for example, depending on preference. “What we’ve learned is we could prod nature a little bit in the lab and engineer these new properties in,” says Widmaier.

“That forms a kind of platform where we are able to design for material property as well as scale up our manufacturing at a good price point, so we can commercialize it.”