Spider silk is incredibly tough and is even stronger than steel. It is extraordinarily elastic too, making it one of the most amazing materials for a broad array of potential applications ranging from medicine, construction to aerospace.
The challenge, however, is to be able to produce sufficient amount of spider-silk material to make a full-scale test of these product ideas. Spiders are solitary animals and they tend to be aggressive, or even cannibalistic, towards each other. They are not farmable animals. This makes spider silk very difficult to produce in large amounts.
A team of researchers has recently created genetically modified silkworms which are able to produce "spider-silk" from their own bodies. They transplanted a specific spider gene into the silkworms, enabling them to spin spider protein onto their own silk thread. The fibres are twice as strong and elastic as normal silkworm silk. Unlike spiders, silkworms can be easily reared in large numbers. It is therefore vastly commercially viable to produce silk in an enormous scale. Perhaps this could be the material of the future.
| JPC Monthly Newsletter | |
| Editor： | Police Public Relations Branch, 11/F Arsenal House, Police Headquarters, No. 1 Arsenal Street, Wan Chai, HK. |
| Tel： | 2860 6157 |
| Fax： | 2200 4304 |
| JPC homepage： | http://www.hkpjpc.org.hk |
| Police homepage： | http://www.police.gov.hk |