| arya | Date: Wednesday, 17-August-2011, 7:31 PM | Message # 1 |
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| With help from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Lewis and his team have figured out a way to put the spider's silk-making genes into goats.
"So what we've done is we've actually cloned the genes for the protein that makes up every one of the spider silks. They make six different kinds of silk and a kind of glue. We know, in particular, (there is) a silk called dragline silk that they use to make the framework of a web, that's the one that most people are interested in," he explains.
Lewis, working with Nexia Biotechnologies, has put those silk genes in goats, in a way that they only make the protein in their milk.
"When the goats have kids, and they start lactating, we collect the milk, and we can purify that spider silk protein in much, much higher quantities," says Lewis.
Full article/source - http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/spidersilk.jsp
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