Benefits Of Silkworms

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Silkworms don’t exhibit the territorialism and cannibalism as seen with spiders, and hence, can be cultivated in mass. This method of cultivating silk is less expensive to scale up the products, and the hosts are naturally equipped to spin silk fibers, hence less work is needed to process the assembled fibers. One requirement of this method of production is that silkworms still produce endogenous silk proteins, thus the resulting product is actually a combination of both silkworm and spider silk fibers. On the other hand the composite fibers have been shown to be tougher than the parental silkworm fibers, and as tough as the native dragline silk fibers. Another down fall is the low level of incorporation of chimeric spider silk fibers in the …show more content…

The vector used was a plasmid, and it contained regulatory sequences, to promote the transcription of the gene, a His-tag, to aid in purification of the protein, as well as the spider silk gene sequence. This specific spider silk gene sequence results in proteins which are really high in glycine. Thus, to ensure efficient silk protein production, the glycyl-tRNA pool was elevated by inserting a second compatible plasmid into the bacteria, which effectively resulted in over expression of the glycyl-tRNA. 7.1.2 Artificial synthesis of spider silk Injecting the spidroins in appropriate hosts like bacteria, plants or mammals seems to be attractive from an environmental point of view as recombinant spidroins correspond to renewable feedstock. On the other hand, based on the host selected, it also has several environmental consequences such as water and energy consumption, agricultural land or rearing requirements and need of physical or chemical treatments of the wastes and by-products to prevent health hazards (pathogenic, toxic or allergenic contamination). In order to artificially synthesize spider silk into fibres, there are two areas that has to be

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