They say spider silk is way stronger than the same amount of steel while also being elastic. What keeps us from creating spider silk for buildings, rockets, airplanes and what not? Do we really need spiders for that?
In: Chemistry
Spider silk isn’t just about producing the protein, but assembling it into strands from its building blocks of x length. This average length is a difficult thing to control because it’s essentially on the subcelluar/molecular level, and artificial methods have largely produced shorter lengths that have notably worse final characteristics–and price wise it just doesn’t make sense also.
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