Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 109, Issue 3, Pages 923-928Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1109420109
Keywords
biomaterials; biotechnology; transgenic animals
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health [R21 EB007247]
- Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China [D3080039]
- University of Notre Dame Office of Research
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The development of a spider silk-manufacturing process is of great interest. However, there are serious problems with natural manufacturing through spider farming, and standard recombinant protein production platforms have provided limited progress due to their inability to assemble spider silk proteins into fibers. Thus, we used piggyBac vectors to create transgenic silkworms encoding chimeric silkworm/spider silk proteins. The silk fibers produced by these animals were composite materials that included chimeric silkworm/spider silk proteins integrated in an extremely stable manner. Furthermore, these composite fibers were, on average, tougher than the parental silkworm silk fibers and as tough as native dragline spider silk fibers. These results demonstrate that silkworms can be engineered to manufacture composite silk fibers containing stably integrated spider silk protein sequences, which significantly improve the overall mechanical properties of the parental silkworm silk fibers.
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