Potential new body armour

["Scott" <becubed@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Canadians spin silk from milk

AFP - A Canadian firm and a US Army lab have engineered a process to produce
spider's silk, known for its tensile strength, from genetically-modified goat's
milk, in research published in the journal Science.

Spider's silk, spun into deceptively fragile webs, is more resistant than Kevlar,
stronger than iron, perfectly biodegradable and could have important uses in
the medical arena, the fishing industry -- even in body armour for the army
if it can be produced in industrial quantities.

By injecting key genetic material from the spider's silk into the mammals' cells,
the researchers were able to obtain the necessary proteins at the base of the
artificial silk.

Researcher Anthoula Lazaris and his team came upon the idea to insert two pair
of spider genes into a hamster liver and cow cells to produce the silk proteins.
They then spun fibres that presented characteristics nearly identical to a spider's
web.

The Montreal-based firm Nexia, which holds the patents on the genes and proteins,
hopes to produce a sizable quantity of the synthetic silk by mid-2002, using
a herd of genetically-modified goats.

 The company essentially retooled the goats' genetic codes to enable the female
goats to produce milk chock-full of the crucial proteins required to spin BioSteel
silk.

"We and others have been working on spider silk for considerable time and are
thrilled finally to have the opportunity to spin synthetic silks and move the
field towards real applications," said Jean Herbert of the Army's Soldier Biological
Chemical Command in Natick, Massachusetts.

"The availability of Nexia's water-soluble recombinant silk proteins has been
a fundamental breakthrough in our ability to spin spider silk fibres."


 İAAP 2001