science
Spider silk is stronger than steel by weight, but spiders cannot be farmed because they eat each other. So companies put spider genes into microbes or yeast to brew the proteins in tanks.
These engineered microbes let companies make spider silk proteins at scale, since the genetic instructions for producing silk are taken from spiders and inserted into microbes or yeast, which then ferment in tanks and secrete the silk proteins as part of their normal metabolism. Those proteins are later collected and spun into fibers that mimic the strength and flexibility of natural spider silk.
Natural rubber comes from the sap of rubber trees, an entirely different biological source with no genetic engineering of microbes involved. Cotton fiber grows naturally from the seed pods of cotton plants, a plant-based textile fiber unrelated to fermented microbial protein production.
This approach exists specifically because spiders cannot be farmed like silkworms, since they are territorial and cannibalistic when kept close together, making microbial fermentation the practical workaround for producing spider silk at any meaningful scale.
science
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