I Didn’t Notice While I Was Taking This Photo Of Some Cortinarius Sp. Mushrooms, But Creeping Up Their

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Silkworms Produce Spider Silk for the First Time - ChemistryViews

Spider silk by silkworms offers a green alternative to synthetic fibers

With the fast fashion industry… how it is… finding sustainable ways to make fabric is super important.  Fibers from synthetic fabrics make up 35% of the microplastics that make their way to the ocean.  Natural fibers sourced from plants or animals are much more environmentally sound options, including silk.

Currently, the only way to get natural silk on a large scale is to harvest it from silkworms.  You’ve probably heard about the strength and durability of spider silk (it is 6x stronger than Kevlar!) but as of yet there hasn’t been a good way of getting it.  Raising spiders the way people do silkworms isn’t really an option.  Spiders need a lot of room to build their webs compared to silkworms, and individual spiders don’t produce that much silk.  Plus, when you put a whole bunch of spiders in captivity together, they tend to start eating each other.

Attempts to artificially recreate spider silk have also been less than successful.  Spider silk has a surface layer of glycoproteins and lipids on it that works as a sort of anti-aging “skin”- allowing the silk to withstand conditions such as sunlight and humidity.  But this layer has been very tricky to reproduce.

However, as scientists in China realized, silkworms produce that same kind of layer on their silk.  So what if we just genetically modified silkworms to produce spider silk?

That is exactly what the researchers at Donghua University in Shanghai did.  A team of researchers introduced spider silk protein genes to silkworms using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and microinjections in silkworm eggs.  In addition to this, they altered the spider silk proteins so that they would interact properly with the other proteins in silkworm glands.  And it worked!  This is the first study ever to produce full length spider silk proteins from silkworms.

The applications of this are incredibly exciting.  In addition to producing comfortable textiles and new, innovative bulletproof vests, silkworm generated spider silk could be used in cutting edge smart materials or even just to create better performing sutures.  In the future, this team intends to research how to modify this new spider silk to be even stronger, and they are confident that “large-scale commercialization is on the horizon."

CRISPR was already on thin fucking ice as a serious name for a biotech technique and now they made up CRISPY-BRED are you joking

little creature of the day: Euglena gracilis

micro organisms time

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Cribraria cancellata by Sarah Lloyd

Abortiporus biennis, 2019-08-26

penicillium in a petri dish

working in a lab is cool and all but so much of your job is just waste clean up and washing dishes 💀

Recent Research Unveils New Genomic Landscape of the Human Gut Microbiome

BGI-Research introduced CGR2, the expanded cultivated genome reference landscape for the human gut microbiome.

Scientists from BGI-Research developed a new version of the Cultivated Genome Reference (CGR), a repository of high-quality draft genomes of the human gut microbiome. The current version of CGR, which is CGR2, has been further expanded to incorporate numerous high-quality draft genomes generated from cultivated bacteria. CGR2 classifies previously unidentified species and uncovers the functional and genomic diversity of bacterial strains. An in-depth analysis of carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAzymes) reveals the phyla with the largest and most diverse repertoires of these enzymes. CGR2 also enabled the identification of genes involved in the synthesis of secondary metabolites in the gut microbiome. The unraveling of the gut microbiome genomic landscape will enable the development of therapeutics and provide a deep insight into the evolution of the human gut microbiome.

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