CSIRO scientist Dr Tara Sutherland and her team have achieved another important milestone in the international quest to artificially produce insect silk.
They have hand-drawn fine threads of honeybee silk from a 'soup' of silk proteins that they had produced transgenically.
These threads were as strong as threads drawn from the honeybee silk gland, a significant step towards development of coiled coil silk biomaterials.
"It means that we can now seriously consider the uses to which these biomimetic materials can be put," Dr Sutherland said.
"We used recombinant cells of bacterium E. coli to produce the silk proteins which, under the right conditions, self-assembled into similar structures to those in honeybee silk.
Article can be found here - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100303092409.htm
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