Scientists produce ‘artificial silk fibre’
Washington: In what is claimed to be a major breakthrough, scientists have produced threads of silk fibre — without the use of insect silk glands.
An international team, led by Dr Tara Sutherland of CSIRO in Australia, has produced the artificial silk after drawing finethreads of honeybee silk from a “soup” of silk proteins that they had produced transgenically.These threads were as strong as threads drawn from the honeybee silk gland, a significant step towards development of coiled coil silk biomaterials, say the scientists. “It means that we can now seriously consider the uses to which these biomimetic materials can be put. We used recombinant cells of bacterium E. Coli to produce the silk proteins which, under the right conditions, self-assembled into similar structures to those in honeybee silk.”“We already knew that honeybee silk fibres could be hand-drawn from the contents of the silk gland so used this knowledge to hand-draw fibres from a sufficiently concentrated and viscous mixture of the recombinant silk proteins.“In fact, we had to draw them twice to produce a translucent stable fibre,” Dr Sutherland said. Dr Sutherland said numerous efforts have been made to express other invertebrate silks in transgenic systems but the complicated structure of the silk genes in other organisms means that producing silk outside silk glands is difficult. “We had previously identified the honeybee silk genes and knew that the silk was encoded by four small non-repetitive genes — a much simpler arrangement which made them excellent candidates for transgenic silk production.” —PTI
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