Bio-Based Synthetic Silk Inspired by Spider Silk

Innovation: Industry

Spiber Inc.

2019

Image: Thomas Bishop / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Manage Tension

When a living system is under tension, it means there is a force pulling on it, like a person pulling on a rope tied to a horse. When applied to a living system, unless the system is completely rigid, the result is that it gets stretched. If stretching exceeds the strength of the living system’s material, it can damage it. Living systems manage tension using materials that are flexible and stretchable enough to survive most tension that occurs in their environment. The ocean’s intertidal zone offers a good example. The waves and incoming and outgoing tides put tension on soft-bodied organisms. Mussels resist tension with flexible threads that hold them onto rocks; in contrast, large algae have stretchy fronds.

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Chemically Assemble Polymers

We might think that complex polymers are the result of human industrial ingenuity, but nature cornered the market on polymers billions of years earlier. Examples of biopolymers are proteins, carbohydrates, and genetic material. In contrast to human industrial processes, within a cell, ribosomes covalently bond amino acids together to form proteins.

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Patents

Brewed Protein from Spiber is a synthetic form of spider silk produced from plant-derived biomass that provide an alternative to traditional textiles.

Benefits

Bio-based
Biodegradable

Applications

Textiles
Fabrics
Resins
Films

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 11: Sustainable Cities & Communities
Goal 12: Responsible Production & Consumption

The Challenge

Textile production often utilizes a great amount of energy, which emits greenhouse gases. These greenhouse gases are harmful to people and the planet. Additionally, many textiles are made of petroleum-based materials that take hundreds of years to degrade. When these materials are discarded, the entire item or part of it could end up as pollution.

Innovation Details

Brewed Protein™️ materials are made from synthetic spider silk using plant-derived sugars as primary raw ingredients. Spiber designs genes that code for the desired structural proteins that will form the silk. Microorganisms are then engineered to produce these proteins with high productivity using fermentation. The proteins are then separated from the liquid mixture containing the microorganisms. These purified proteins are then dried and the resulting synthetic silk is processed into a variety of forms, such as fibers and films.

The Moon Parka was created with Brewed Protein™ in collaboration with The North Face®.

Biological Model

Spider silk is extremely strong and flexible despite being an incredibly thin and lightweight material. This is due in part to the multiple different chains that are interlinked to help provide stability. Between the connections are unlinked protein chains that also allow for significant elasticity.

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