SEED: 丝绸可以在任意生物上制造出来，可以形成几乎任何形态，而且可以用于制作医药用品和光学仪器！
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_silk_renaissance/P1/
一篇充满激情，遐想和科学展望的报道
In the past decade, scientists have come up with several ways of producing silk cheaply, in bulk, without spiders or silkworms, all by utilizing the power of genomics. Progress started in 1999 when a geneticist named Randolph Lewis at the University of Wyoming decoded the silk gene sequence of Nephila clavipes spiders (“orb weavers”), identifying the genetic instructions that those spiders follow to assemble silk protein. Since the genes of all living things are conveniently written in the same programming language, that of DNA, a fully functional snippet of DNA identical to the orb weaver’s silk gene can be inserted into the DNA of other life forms. The silk gene, once identified in spiders, could theoretically be used to make any organism create silk.
Soon after Lewis decoded the silk gene, molecular biologists at a Canadian company called Nexia Biotechnologies inserted it near the milk gene in goat egg cells. These were fertilized, gestated, and born, growing up to be world-famous goats that in 2002 produced a syrupy solution of silk in their milk. The tricky part, according to the biologists, was gleaning silk protein from the syrup and turning it into a product they called BioSteel—the first “transgenic” material ever made. Despite the company’s processing difficulties, the New York Times Magazine described Nexia’s research as writing “a new chapter in biotechnology.”
There were still more chapters to come on the subject of neat-and-tidier ways to make silk. A group led by Sang Yup Lee at KAIST, a technology institute in Korea, chose to slip the silk gene into the DNA of Escherichia coli bacteria. E. coli is the darling of molecular biology, due to its simple genome and low-maintenance laboratory growth. It also is unusually proficient at following genetic orders. By transplanting spider DNA into E. coli, the KAIST biologists created strains of the bacteria that synthesize silk protein in less than a day. Two more days of purification produce a solution of liquefied silk, and so, after a mere three days’ work, the technique produces silk, in a process far more efficient than that used by traditional silk farmers. Lee and his colleagues believe their method of transgenic silk cultivation is ready to be scaled up and commercialized.
...
Depending on how it is processed, silk can take on a variety of manifestations. It can be a fiber, a liquid, a sponge, or a gel; it can be poured into a mold and hardened as a solid plastic. In all these forms it is optically transparent. This is hard to tell from silk fabric, which has tightly-woven fibers that tend to scatter light, but silk itself is clear, as anyone who has ever walked through an unseen spider web can confirm.
Best of all, silk is extremely biocompatible: It meshes well with living things, whether beneath or on top of their skin. Nobody knows quite why this is so, but Kaplan has offered the most likely hypothesis. “The protein is made of amino acids like glycine and alanine which are extremely hydrophobic (water-repellant),” he explained, “so when you implant silk inside the body, which is a very watery place, we think it’s as if your body doesn’t see it.” Silk isn’t entirely ignored by the body’s immune system. Inside the body, rather than being attacked by an army of white blood cells, silk is gradually broken down, and its amino acids are recycled and used.
In short, silk is a malleable, clear, organic, phase-changing, biotic material, the like of which does not exist elsewhere on this planet. As more uses for it are imagined and actualized, what began as purely curiosity-driven science has evolved into a research project that Enriquez has described as possessing “the potential to change the world.”
A potentially higher-impact development is that of doped silk implants, which aim to revolutionize drug delivery, especially for the treatment of chronic illnesses. According to Eleanor Pritchard, a Tufts engineer, the dime-sized implants are made by blending drugs into a liquid silk solution and then shaping and hardening the mixture to form a small film. The drugs stay evenly mixed throughout the film; on the molecular level, they are locked in a grid of silk proteins. When the film is implanted under the skin, the silk biodegrades, gradually releasing the drug at a steady rate. The time frame over which the silk breaks down, which can range from days to years, is a precisely controllable parameter that depends on what percentage of the silk has crystallized during fabrication. Pritchard explained that this technology is directed toward patients in need of long-term drug supplies. “Instead of taking daily growth-hormone shots, or dosages of anti-seizure medications,” she observed, “patients can get these implants and receive a constant, stable dosage of whatever it is they need.”
...
With silk optics, a new field is being established: one in which optical detectors, monitors, biochemical sensors, and metamaterials can be implanted directly in the body, to send and receive information to the outside world.
...
As soon as silk is cheaply available, Omenetto foresees that it could replace petroleum-derived plastic worldwide. Water bottles, grocery bags, toys, ball-point pens: all such things, he believes, could eventually be made of biodegradable silk instead of synthetic polymers. Manufacturing of such products would be entirely green and water-based, and their lifetime could be varied to suit their use. Omenetto is an optimist, to be sure, but he is also a man of action. After hearing him talk, and surveying all that he has accomplished so far, one begins to think that perhaps the days of landscapes ravaged by discarded, decay-resistant plastic trash really are numbered.
一篇充满激情，遐想和科学展望的报道
In the past decade, scientists have come up with several ways of producing silk cheaply, in bulk, without spiders or silkworms, all by utilizing the power of genomics. Progress started in 1999 when a geneticist named Randolph Lewis at the University of Wyoming decoded the silk gene sequence of Nephila clavipes spiders (“orb weavers”), identifying the genetic instructions that those spiders follow to assemble silk protein. Since the genes of all living things are conveniently written in the same programming language, that of DNA, a fully functional snippet of DNA identical to the orb weaver’s silk gene can be inserted into the DNA of other life forms. The silk gene, once identified in spiders, could theoretically be used to make any organism create silk.
Soon after Lewis decoded the silk gene, molecular biologists at a Canadian company called Nexia Biotechnologies inserted it near the milk gene in goat egg cells. These were fertilized, gestated, and born, growing up to be world-famous goats that in 2002 produced a syrupy solution of silk in their milk. The tricky part, according to the biologists, was gleaning silk protein from the syrup and turning it into a product they called BioSteel—the first “transgenic” material ever made. Despite the company’s processing difficulties, the New York Times Magazine described Nexia’s research as writing “a new chapter in biotechnology.”
There were still more chapters to come on the subject of neat-and-tidier ways to make silk. A group led by Sang Yup Lee at KAIST, a technology institute in Korea, chose to slip the silk gene into the DNA of Escherichia coli bacteria. E. coli is the darling of molecular biology, due to its simple genome and low-maintenance laboratory growth. It also is unusually proficient at following genetic orders. By transplanting spider DNA into E. coli, the KAIST biologists created strains of the bacteria that synthesize silk protein in less than a day. Two more days of purification produce a solution of liquefied silk, and so, after a mere three days’ work, the technique produces silk, in a process far more efficient than that used by traditional silk farmers. Lee and his colleagues believe their method of transgenic silk cultivation is ready to be scaled up and commercialized.
...
Depending on how it is processed, silk can take on a variety of manifestations. It can be a fiber, a liquid, a sponge, or a gel; it can be poured into a mold and hardened as a solid plastic. In all these forms it is optically transparent. This is hard to tell from silk fabric, which has tightly-woven fibers that tend to scatter light, but silk itself is clear, as anyone who has ever walked through an unseen spider web can confirm.
Best of all, silk is extremely biocompatible: It meshes well with living things, whether beneath or on top of their skin. Nobody knows quite why this is so, but Kaplan has offered the most likely hypothesis. “The protein is made of amino acids like glycine and alanine which are extremely hydrophobic (water-repellant),” he explained, “so when you implant silk inside the body, which is a very watery place, we think it’s as if your body doesn’t see it.” Silk isn’t entirely ignored by the body’s immune system. Inside the body, rather than being attacked by an army of white blood cells, silk is gradually broken down, and its amino acids are recycled and used.
In short, silk is a malleable, clear, organic, phase-changing, biotic material, the like of which does not exist elsewhere on this planet. As more uses for it are imagined and actualized, what began as purely curiosity-driven science has evolved into a research project that Enriquez has described as possessing “the potential to change the world.”
A potentially higher-impact development is that of doped silk implants, which aim to revolutionize drug delivery, especially for the treatment of chronic illnesses. According to Eleanor Pritchard, a Tufts engineer, the dime-sized implants are made by blending drugs into a liquid silk solution and then shaping and hardening the mixture to form a small film. The drugs stay evenly mixed throughout the film; on the molecular level, they are locked in a grid of silk proteins. When the film is implanted under the skin, the silk biodegrades, gradually releasing the drug at a steady rate. The time frame over which the silk breaks down, which can range from days to years, is a precisely controllable parameter that depends on what percentage of the silk has crystallized during fabrication. Pritchard explained that this technology is directed toward patients in need of long-term drug supplies. “Instead of taking daily growth-hormone shots, or dosages of anti-seizure medications,” she observed, “patients can get these implants and receive a constant, stable dosage of whatever it is they need.”
...
With silk optics, a new field is being established: one in which optical detectors, monitors, biochemical sensors, and metamaterials can be implanted directly in the body, to send and receive information to the outside world.
...
As soon as silk is cheaply available, Omenetto foresees that it could replace petroleum-derived plastic worldwide. Water bottles, grocery bags, toys, ball-point pens: all such things, he believes, could eventually be made of biodegradable silk instead of synthetic polymers. Manufacturing of such products would be entirely green and water-based, and their lifetime could be varied to suit their use. Omenetto is an optimist, to be sure, but he is also a man of action. After hearing him talk, and surveying all that he has accomplished so far, one begins to think that perhaps the days of landscapes ravaged by discarded, decay-resistant plastic trash really are numbered.
