For a long time, we’ve known that spider’s silk is the bee’s knees. It’s so incredibly dense and possesses such herculean strength that it can theoretically be used to create bulletproof skin (skin, not just vests). And it conducts heat far better than copper, our usual conductor. The stuff is five times as strong as steel, but harvesting large quantities of it proves difficult at best.
That’s changed, as we can now commercially produce spider’s silk. AMSilk has figurted out how to do it without having a billion black widows running around some horrible barn. That wouldn’t work anyway, since spiders are cannibalistic and angry creatures. They’d eat each other before creating enough silk to make a nice shirt, much less a bulletproof vest. Instead, the company uses something that’s almost equally horrifying: the bacteria E. coli! That’s right, AMSilk uses the bacteria known for horrible food poisoning to create a material that's useful for all sorts of things.
Researchers genetically modified E. coli, crossing it with European garden cross spider DNA, so the bacteria would create four different varieties of silk in 20 different grades. I hope this doesn’t creep you out too much, because the company has already been selling it to shampoo and cosmetic companies for integration into the products. This isn’t as strange as it sounds: silk is a sought-after commodity for a number of reasons, mostly its strength and durability. It’s just best not to think about where it’s born.
"This is scalable technology," AMSilk managing director Axel H. Leimer said. "If someone ordered 1 ton, we could make it. We have already made a half a ton.” Leimer expects sales to be hit $10 million in the next couple of years, $100 million once it goes large-scale. There’s even talk of it being used to coat breast implants to reduce the body’s natural reaction to the silicon.
AMSilk, via io9
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