Author: Jeremy Rehm / Source: Science News
Bacteria are helping to make engineered silk that rivals the strength and stretchiness of a spider’s stiff dragline silk, the type from which the arachnids dangle.
Pound for pound, dragline silk is stronger and tougher than steel. Engineers have tried for decades to create a synthetic mimic from genetically modified bacteria, yeast and even goat milk, but have always fallen short.
Part of the challenge is that the genetic information for dragline silk is a long string of repeating DNA. And those previously tested organisms’ cell machinery haphazardly alters or chops up such series.
To overcome this issue, researchers precisely separated the repeating DNA into bits and inserted each repeating piece into an E. coli microbe. These smaller pieces were less likely to be further altered within the bacteria, and each…
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