There are few things as haunting as walking into a spider web. But the special silk behind these universally reviled arachnid nets shows huge promise for saving human lives, from battling cancer to making better hearing aids.
That’s because spider silk is strong, flexible, and lightweight. The problem is, spiders are extremely territorial and cannibalistic creatures, making spider silk hard to propagate.
But in a new study by researchers at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, genetically engineered silkworms were shown to produce higher yields of spider silk (without carrying the risk of eating each other). By using the gene editing tool TALEN, researchers replaced part of the silkworm genome with that of the golden orb-web spider. A paper detailing the research, which may pave a path towards mass production, was published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This work provides a stable, cost-effective … system to produce spider silk in large-scale by using genetically engineered silkworms,” Anjiang Tan, a researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, told Digital Trends.
The recent study made two significant achievements, according to Tan. For one, the amount of spider silk found in the silkworms’ silk was significantly greater — 35.2 percent compared to the less than 5 percent achieved in previous studies. And the silkworms were able to directly spin out ready-to-use spider silk, a feature that Tan called “very cost-effective.”
As an added bonus, Tan said the gene-editing technique enables researchers to engineer silkworms that can excrete not only spider silk but “custom-designed silk or other proteins for different purposes in the future.” Silkworms have also been used to produce silk for thousands of years, giving future spider silk farmers a much more manageable animal to rear.
Spider silk has been gaining a lot of attention over the past few years, grabbing headlines for its promise as a material of the future.
In June, researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland showed how microcapsules made from artificial spider silk could be used to deliver cancer-battling vaccines directly to the immune system. A year earlier, researches at MedUni Vienna and Vienna General Hospital in Austria demonstrated that super strong spider silk from the golden orb-weaver spider could be used to repair severe nerve damage. That same month, a team from the University of Cambridge even showed how artificial silk could someday be used to make bulletproof vests more protective.
The recent study provides a potential route toward mass production of spider silk that would help make the promising material more accessible. Moving forward, Tan and his team want to try out different combinations of spider silk genes to increase efficiency and productivity, while unlocking the spider gene sequence to better understand what protein structures give this material its outstanding properties.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.