The Digest’s Top 10 Innovations for the week of May 30th, 2018

Kraig Biocraft develops spider silk proteins breakthrough

In Michigan, Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc., and its R&D team have achieved a major breakthrough in the construction of DNA encoding for spider silk proteins. With this new capability they believe that it should be able to reduce the customization timeframe, for new spider silk technologies, by several months.

The new protocols were developed after Kraig Labs reached out to leading DNA synthesis facilities, which all stated that construction of the desired sequences would be practically impossible, due to the unique structure of spider silk proteins. Refusing to accept that answer, Kraig’s research team then took on the task directly.

Using a combination of distinct approaches, Kraig Labs successfully synthesized the highly complex set of spider silk protein construct designs. This new approach should accelerate the pace of its research and production rollout efforts, as well as reduce costs to develop new transgenics for new potential markets and applications.

The newly designed protein constructs are currently being prepared for incorporation into the Company’s spider silk platform technology. Due to their construction, these new designs may have the potential to produce new silk fibers with even greater strength and flexibility than the Company’s current generation of recombinant spider silk.