Improved Spider Silk Manufacturing

Spider silks are highly desired for their incredible tensile strengths and low densities, but have proved difficult to produce at scale until now. While researchers have previously managed to create bacteria that produce artificial silk at scalable rates, they had failed to mimic the spiders’ “post-spin” processes, necessary in creating the materials’ strength. However, a deceptively obvious technique from researchers at the University of the Pacific revolutionizes this post-spin process and makes spider silk production and purification viable at a commercial level. All the researchers did was introduce a mechanical actuator; a shockingly simple improvement with the profound effect of increasing silk strength and uniformity by removing human error from the process. The procedure is not quite ready to be rolled out en mass, but it will be soon. When mass production does arrive, spider silks can be expected to replace kevlar, steel, and carbon fiber due to their strength and lightweight.