Do You Dare To Wear Clothes Made Of Spider Silk?

According to the world clothing and shoe net, in 1709, Mr. Fran C OIS Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire, President of the Montpelier court of France, presented a pair of silver spider silk to Louis Xiv.

It is woven by hundreds of carefully collected oocysts.

"The only difficulty now is to buy enough" Spider Egg bags "to do a lot of work.

Bon wrote in a letter to the Royal Society in second.

More than three centuries later, this insurmountable hardship has been resolved, and non Royal people have the first opportunity to buy spider silk clothing - a dark green tie made by Bolt Threads, a biotechnology company in the bay area, with a limit of 50.

Spiders, of course, have been producing spider silk for their own purpose since ancient times.

According to Paul Hillyard, author of the private life of spiders, the earliest evidence came from the three million and eight hundred thousand year old Devonian shale in New York, where paleontologists discovered the hips of petrified spiders, a showerhead with twenty gates of arachnoid animals. Ancient spiders pull them out through them, and then combine these spider silk into a single line.

Since then, spiders have evolved into seven highly differentiated silk glands.

Male crab spiders will produce grape shaped glands to bind their female spiders before mating; female spiders will form Oval Tubular oocysts; and live spider spiders will generate special sticky spider silk balls to build heavy slewing doors of stratified formations and spider silk.

However, the most versatile type is the ampulla or behind the body to avoid the enemy silk. Spiders use them to drop along the rope and build spider web.

Taken together, these different kinds of spider silk can be applied to seemingly infinite forms: spider silk diving bell, spider silk sunshade, and even spider silk.

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(Hillyard noted, "a small, seemingly disordered white spider silk" is unexpectedly like a bird droppings.

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Man's use of spider silk lags behind the originality of arachnoid animals.

It is said that the ancient Greeks used oocysts to bandage the wounds, while the New Guinea fishermen knew that weave the web of spider web into a fishing net.

However, in

The net of silkworm knot occupied a dominant position.

Bon attributed this to human prejudice against such a contemptible insect, but the more practical reason is that spiders have been proved resistant to domestication.

"Raising young spiders in the room," Bon emphasized, would end in a way: they fight each other and eat each other.

This is a pity, because spider silk is a magical material.

Spider silk is very tough, stronger than steel, and is also tearing resistant to the fibers.

Although humans can relatively easily pass through spider webs, it is because each line has a diameter of only 3/1000 millimeters.

If it is extended to more than one millimeter, it is estimated that a spider web can catch a helicopter like a fly.

Spider silk is also very elastic and light; some spider silk can stretch to five times the original length before breaking, and the weight of spider silk that is enough to circle the earth is only more than a pound.

Spiders are excellent chemists who often make their spider silk waterproof and bacteriostatic.

Under this temptation, a few entrepreneurs who are obsessed with spider silk have been trying to catch up with Bon for several years.

Burt Green Wilder, a surgeon of the civil war, was well known for using the term "neurons" before anyone else and collecting salted brains.

He reported that when he served with an African American fifty-fourth volunteer Volunteer Infantry Regiment in Folly Island, South Carolina, he extracted one hundred and fifty yards of gold thread from a large round spider.

Inspired by Wilder, he continued to design a very tiny silk threading machine: a hinge board fixed the spider's head and legs on one side, fixed his abdomen on the other side, and the hand scrolls pulled the spider silk out.

This is a clever device, but Wilder later concluded that weaving a spider silk dress requires five thousand animal ingredients.

After more than one century, science did not get much development.

In 1982, researchers at North Carolina State University were still publishing papers describing the "device and technology of forcing spiders to spin silk" - essentially an upgraded version of the device invented by Wilder, which can accommodate dozens of spiders at a time.

Then the 90s gene revolution can create spider silk by giving DNA more docile species.

No longer need a spider's dairy farm and farm; genetically modified E. coli, yeasts, tobacco plants and even goats can make spider silk.

(after the failure of biotechnology companies to produce spider silk in goat milk, the remains of the Biosteel goat, funded by the Ministry of defense, are now stored in Utah State University.

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According to Dan Widmaier, chief executive and co founder of Bolt, the problem is that even if the living spiders are removed from this equation, this process still exists.

The company chose to make spider silk from fermented beer yeast in stainless steel tanks using water and sugar - a fairly simple device.

But the gene sequences produced by spider silk are almost entirely made up of two of the four molecules of DNA, which means they are highly repetitive and easily destroyed.

Widmaier said that the process of repairing these sequences to make yeast express different silk proteins is "painful". According to his estimate, since its establishment in 2009, Bolt has used more than four thousand formulations.

"Then, once you have finished the fermentation, and the worms have made all these beautiful proteins, then your next question is how to use them in a high quality, pure fluid form as your textile raw material."

He said.

In other words, the yeast had to be decomposed, so Widmaier and his colleagues were no longer forced to separate every cell.

The silk protein was separated from the saccharide yeast water in the fermentation tank of Bolt and purified into powder.

"It looks like something you bought from GNC (Jian An Xi, Nutritional Foods Inc) to shake your muscles."

The powder is then mixed with the solvent until it sticks to the viscosity of the rubber adhesive: the resulting foam is called the spinning fluid and can be extruded through the die to produce fibers.

(essentially, spiders rely on a push pull mechanism to pform their spin coating into thread: a sudden drop in blood pressure forces the sticky silk protein to sprout from the shower nozzle of its abdomen, and spiders use their legs and body strength to pull these balls into spider silk.

"In rotation, there are a lot of tedious and common problems."

Widmaier said.

Any slight adjustment of protein purity, viscosity, pH and temperature can convert the spinning fluid into a viscous mixture to form small beads instead of silk or blockage.

So Widmaier's pride was that he produced fifty neckties, each tie equivalent to ninety km of spider silk.

The bankrupt companies behind {page_break} Bolt Threads and Utah Biosteel goats are not alone on the way to genetic engineering spider silk.

Last year, a Japanese company called Spiber made a one-off coats with The North Face from Escherichia coli, and Adidas cooperated with AMSilk, a German biological material company, to create spider silk sports shoes.

However, Bolt has won the competition in the manufacture of commercial products, even though its production is so small that the company chooses the Buyers by random Yaohao.

At present, these ties are not strong enough for steel, they are bulletproof, waterproof and resilient - Widmaier suggests that they should be carefully managed. But back in the lab, he said the company is working with Patagonia to develop more ambitious products.

Companies are also working to improve their environmental impact.

Compared to any other industry, the textile industry produces the most polluted wastewater, mainly due to the causes of synthetic dyes, so Bolt is developing a yeast strain that can discharge color and spider silk.

In the long run, Widmaier said his goal is to isolate yeast from corn sugar, a kind of crop that can be eaten by humans and cellulosic sugars from waste paper, sawdust and sewage sludge.

Biomimetic fibers have provided an important environmental advantage in the last major leap of the industry - petrochemical based fabrics, such as nylon and spandex.

The company has not only surpassed the tie, but also surpassed the silk.

"To a certain extent, this is a remnant of a research institute, called spider silk."

Widmaier said, "after considering all the circumstances, we are making protein fibers, which have cross sections, textures and properties, which make them feel like almost anything you want - wool, nylon or a brand new thing."

In the future, biological silk may appear in the form of military armour and medicine packaging, but Widmaier's dream is simple: producing a better, more durable and more comfortable long sleeved sweater.

"I know this is not a space capsule," he said. "But this is something that really excuses me."

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