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  • It's tougher than any man-made material

  • It's a combination of strength and elasticity.

  • No other material can actually combine these two features.

  • Either material is strong or it's elastic.

  • Spider silk is both.

  • Five times stronger than steel, spider silk has been tantalizing

  • the human imagination for decades.

  • You want to be Spider Man? You have to make fibers.

  • But we can’t just farm the silk , because spiders eat each other,

  • so scientists have pursued other routes.

  • A DNA sequencing breakthrough in Germany means

  • manufacturing spider silk fiber is no longer pure fantasy.

  • The next step is really producing tons of the material.

  • In all the offices we have spiders and they're like pets.

  • We like to have them around. We think they're beautiful.

  • If eight-legged co-workers make your skin crawl,

  • then the biomaterials lab at Bayreuth University probably isn’t for you.

  • It’s here that Professor Thomas Scheibel and his team study natural substances like

  • spider silk in the hope of turning them into super materials.

  • Spider silk has for a lot of material scientists been the holy grail for decades.

  • If we take a thumb thick spider fiber, we could actually get a jumbo jet holding up

  • in air without tearing it apart.

  • It can withstand hundreds of tons of load in full speed without breaking.

  • The best silk producers are orb-weaving spiders.

  • They have seven different types of silk with different properties.

  • We find dramatic differences there concerning mechanics but also concerning other properties.

  • Wanting to harness these characteristics led to Scheibel’s breakthrough in genetically

  • modifying bacteria to produce spider silk proteins.

  • This patented technology formed the basis of AMSilk, the company Scheibel founded with

  • a postdoc from his research lab, Lin Roemer.

  • The bacteria we are using as working horse are very simple organisms.

  • They only try to grow. And we exploit that,

  • we're feeding them, we give them perfect conditions to live

  • and they multiply and multiply.

  • And afterwards we change their way of living,

  • we give a trigger so that they stop proliferating

  • and they start producing our protein.

  • After purification, we have the protein in form of a white powder.

  • AMSilk takes the protein powder, and spins it into a fiber.

  • So what you can see here is our spinning machine

  • where we produce our Biosteel fiber,

  • which is then transferred to the yarner,

  • who can make the yarn and later the fabric

  • out of the material.

  • The material is a vegan and biodegradeable synthetic biopolymer.

  • Rather than use the BioSteel material in their own product,

  • AMSilk wants to produce it for

  • established brands, who have expertise.

  • Adidas used it to create a concept shoe

  • and Omega made a special edition watch strap.

  • Airbus are also exploring how it can be used in aviation.

  • They know their product. We develop together with them,

  • the product has much higher quality

  • in comparison to what we could do on our own.

  • The company has raised millions in venture capital, but producing enough of the material

  • is the biggest challenge.

  • As it is very thin you need a lot of the fibre, in a normal sports shoe

  • there are more than 170 kilometres of this fiber,

  • processed into the yarn and later the fabric of the shoe

  • The company says it has made hundreds of thousands of kilometres of fibre so far

  • but scaling it up further will take time and money.

  • But like the orb-weaving spider which uses different silks

  • for different parts of the web, AMSilk is putting

  • the spider silk proteins to use elsewhere.

  • In the beginning we had this great innovation. We had thousands of opportunities

  • how to use that for industry.

  • This was a beautiful problem.

  • You can use it for different applications.

  • Everyone had the experience when he goes to the basement

  • that there might be a spider's web.

  • If it's an old house, it might be there for hundreds of year and it's not degraded.

  • The question is why?

  • Microbes have a big problem sticking to the web.

  • If you're lost in the woods, get a web. You can use it as a wound coverage device, you

  • can wrap your food. You can actually prevent your food for rotting for a few days.

  • The material is a proteinaceous materials. We are all made out of proteins and our body

  • responds very good to the protein and that's very suitable for a lot of medical devices.

  • We probably have more than 80 different variants of silk molecules that we can play with.

  • Some of them are very well suited for tissue regeneration,

  • some of them are absolutely the opposite.

  • We're really just at the beginning into understanding how this material has evolved to actually

  • feature different kinds of applications.

  • That's exactly what we want.

  • AMSilk is building up production facilities to make its material at mass scale. It's hoping

  • to capitalize on the product’s broad potential and take a lead in an industry harnessing

  • the best attributes of natural substances.

  • We're living in a time where materials made from proteins

  • will become more important every day.

It's tougher than any man-made material

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