Team:UCLA/Project/Honeybee Silk

Honeybee Silk

Although lesser known than silkworm or spider silk, honey bee silk has emerged as an exciting candidate for a wide range of materials applications. The elasticity of honeybee silk in fact exceeds that of spider and silkworm silk, while still maintaining a high level of strength. A huge advantage of honeybee silk is that it is much more amenable to being produced through by recombinant E. coli due to the fact that the honeybee silk protein is much smaller and less repetitive than its spider and silkworm counterparts. We aim to modify honeybee silk at the genetic level to add novel functionality to our silk materials. For example, fusing fluorescent markers to silk would allow us to create honeybee materials in a wide range of colors.