Why Scientists Are Crossing Goats With Spider Genes
Randy Lewis told AFN in 2019 that there were many potential applications for his goat-milked silk. He said that the first commercial uses would probably be for fibers, gels, coatings, and adhesives. He also received a grant from the U.S. Navy in 2018 to develop an underwater spider web that could be used to tangle the propellers of enemy boats.
However, like Nexia, Lewis and his team are finding that goats might not be the best replacement silk spinners after all. His team has also worked on producing spider silk from genetically modified bacteria, alfalfa, and silk worms. In 2019, he co-wrote a paper published in Biomacromolecules explaining how they had used CRISPR/Cas9 technology to insert spider silk genes into the Bombyx mori silkworm. CRISPR/Cas9, which stands for "Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein-9 nuclease," makes it possible to edit genes, a Utah State University press release explained. This technology should make it easier to mass-produce spider silk without spiders. "Prior to using CRISPR, our attempts to insert spider protein DNA into transgenic hosts were somewhat random," Lewis said in the press release.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunCElWxscW5frLW6edKcoJ6mpJ7Atb%2BMmqmeZZOnvLS%2FyKeeZp%2BflsG0edaiq6Flo6W2pbHRZp6eppWofA%3D%3D