SPIDER GOAT, SPIDER GOAT... YES, IT'S SPIDERGOAT
It has been announced that goats producing a spider-silk product in their milk have been engineered by Nexia Biotechnologies, Inc. working in conjunction with the U.S. Army's Soldier Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM). The animals were created by splicing in a few select genes from orb-weaving spiders into the egg cells of goats. The process was begun several years ago with two goats, named Webster and Peter, whose progeny have now gone on to foster a spidergoat herd over 50 animals strong, all living at a research farm in Montreal, Canada, and all producing silk in their milk. Other than that, they look just like normal goats - no fancy blue and red costumes.
It has long been known that certain types of spider silk can be up to 5 times stronger than steel. An allied airman during the second world war, for example, relied on black widow's silk for a great deal of the material making up his parachute's guidelines. Many current conventional steel structures, if they could be made from a spidersilk-like substance, would be many times stronger than they are now, as well as much lighter. The problem is that it is highly impractical to acquire silk in large quantities. Getting silk from an individual spider in sufficient amounts is hard enough; the problem is compounded by the fact that spiders kill each other when in close proximity and are thus impossible to farm on a large scale. A fast, cheap way of obtaining lots of spidersilk, or it's synthetic equivalent, has been a longstanding dream of materials scientists. According to Dr. Jeffrey Turner, President of Nexia, "Spider silk is a material science wonder, a self-assembling, biodegradable, high-performance, nanofiber structure 1/10 the width of a human hair that can stop a bee traveling at 20 miles per hour without breaking. Spider silk has dwarfed man's achievements in material science to date. It's incredible that a tiny animal found literally in your backyard can create such an amazing material by using only amino acids, the same building blocks that are used to make skin and hair." Indeed, plentiful spidersilk for industrial applications would be a breakthrough for the burgeoning field of nanotechnology.
Another advantage silk has over steel is its biodegradability. Nexia plans to market it's product, under the tradename BioSteel, with initial retail items to include fishing lines and medical sutures, to be on the market possibly as early as 2003. The military's interest is in body armor that will be stronger and lighter than that which is used currently. For more on this story, click
here.
current science news posted by ted at 6/23/2002 01:40:00 PM
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