The project is relatively straight forward. We'll be taking a silk gene out of black widow spiders, and building a plasmid, or small piece of DNA that makes it express in a species of yeast so that it can be produced en mass easily. That isn't the end of the project though. Once the silk is being successfully expressed and collected, we'll begin to modify the silk to have new or extra properties. 

Once this plasmid is built it will be released for those interested to play around with and modify for their own projects. When the project is complete the results will be published in a peer reviewed journal. 

 

Future iterations may involve silks from other species like spider mites, and may eventually move past yeast and start modifying silk worms to produce these silks instead of their native variants. We'll also be explore extracting and spinning fibers from the silk we produce in yeast.