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Why spider silk?
An ancient biomaterial for the future.
Spider silk has a tensile strength that is higher or as high as any man made materials,
and combines that with an elasticity, and that combination far exceeds
the materials properties of any man-made materials currently available.
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I think one of the interesting things about using spider silk
for product development is, there's really a plethora of areas that we can go into.
So, for instance, if we look at the medical field, we can look at things like ultra fine sutures,
for eye surgery, nerve surgery. We can look at artificial ligaments
and artificial tendons. We have interest in using it as a scaffold for rebuilding
things like bones, particularly around the jaw and places like that.
In commercial applications, people are looking at it for things as varied as
tire cords to high fashion clothing, climbing ropes, other kinds
of sports equipment, so there really is a very wide variety of applications
that people have talked to us about in using spider silk for.
And when we take a look even at some of the strangest
things that we've learned out of spider silk, about the
thermal properties, how we can potentially use something like that in the electronics industry.
The thermal conductivity of spider silk
the natural spider silk, is comparable to copper.
That is extremely high, because there are only a few
natural materials that is higher than copper.
Being able to use a lightweight, very conductive media
if we can use these in ah, I guess in a space application, it would be very beneficial.
And if spider silk can do that,
that's absolutely amazing.
Incredible, and all of this is because
of we've got this kind of fundamental new material,
that we get a chance to explore, and to grow, and to develop.
It's real exciting to have something like that within a research center or a research
institute like we do at SBI.
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The kind of relationship that we want to create
here at Utah State University with our commercial partners,
is a very interactive working relationship. The commercial
enterprises unit will ensure that there's a effective
flow of communication between the researcher and the corporate partner.
Our unit will also ensure that legal aspects of the relationship
are carefully constructed and maintained, so that intellectual property
is protected, so that confidentiality is protected.
Synthetic spider silk and the research that
is surrounding this technology is one of the
most interesting and exciting opportunities that I think that we're pursuing here at Utah State University.
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The engineering side of it is amazing, we're taking
something that a scientist has made, said "hey, look what I can do."
And what I'm trying to do is take that and make it into something
that we can use commercially, that we can use on an industrial level to really change
the way that we live. And that's really exciting for me.
So {what} we've developed is a system to be able produce large quantities of the
spider silk protein, in other kinds of systems. And the simplest system is bacteria.
We take the spider silk gene, whether it's one from the spider itself or one that we
we've created artificially, we plunk it into the bacteria, we turn the bacteria
on, and it starts making protein for us. We've developed a system to
make a very rapid and easy purification of the spider silk protein,
and then we spin fibers from that particular protein.
Bacteria is the easiest system that you could work with. First off,
using bacteria, it's cheap, and then, uh, you can get a lot of
proteins out of it, within a very short time.
In a similar way, what we've done is transferred genes into goats.
With the idea that they'll produce the spider silk protein in the milk. And the nice
part about that is, is that they actually produce a large quantity.
Finally what we've done, is we've been able to transfer the spider silk gene, into a silkworm.
And the silkworm produces our spider silk protein along with it's
proteins, in making the cocoon silk.
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So right now we have about 20 students working in a lab, split between
graduate students and undergraduates. What excites me about working in
Randy's spider silk lab, is trying to figure out how to
commercialize a product that we know has a ton of uses, but we have to get enough of it
These silks and all of this protein, and all of this work has a wide applicability
and it could well be something that we use commonly in the next twenty years.
There are undergraduate students, there are Master's students, there are PhD
students, they're going to be responsible to be able to move that
to the marketplace by the time they graduate. Now for a student
to have that kind of experience is a great opportunity.
To be able to say "I did this" in the early days of spider
silk. That is just going to be absolutely wonderful.
There are numerous opportunities for these advanced materials that we haven't even begun to
explore. We want to make sure that we have a working relationship that
will create results that are relevant to the researcher,
and relevant to the corporate partner.
It is an opportunity
for us to show what USTAR and the vision of the legislature
has when they created that USTAR project. And to be able to
demonstrate that we can go all the way from an idea in academia,
to a successful company in the marketplace
that is one of the most important things that we can do
over the next few years.
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