Team:UCLA/Projects/Silks

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Silks

Spider Silk

Well known as a remarkable natural material, spider silk exhibits an incredible range of strength and elasticity. Silk-weaving spiders can actually choose from a wide array of silks (such as dragline, capture-spiral, and egg cocoon silk), each having its own unique physical profile and genetic origin. However, one thing that’s common to all silk is that their genes are comprised of highly-repetitive modules. By comparing the contribution of each type of module to the silk fiber’s physical properties, we can begin to understand how to create a collection of silk modules to build our own gene!

By genetically engineering the repetitive modules, and stringing them together in defined orders and ratios, we can customize the physical properties of the resulting silk fibers. Given the diversity that naturally exists across different types of silk, we can potentially assemble a massive library of silk proteins with an impressive range of strength and elasticity for a variety of applications. We plan on optimizing the compatibility of the iterative capped assembly (ICA) technique for the iGEM competition, creating a standardized method of assembling any highly-repetitive gene fragment in an efficient, user-definable manner. Having a library of silk gene blocks to choose from, and an optimized protocol for assembling them, we can optimize the selection and production of programmable silk with custom properties.

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.