Hard-working microbes engineered to produce strong spider silk could one day aid astronauts living on Mars.
A new method of bio-manufacturing could harness the power of genetically modified bacteria to make one of the strongest and rarest materials on Earth -- spider silk.
Why it matters: NASA is looking for ways to reduce the amount of material needed to launch to space for long-duration missions. Engineering microbes to make spider silk could aid in that effort.
While other experiments have attempted to pair silk proteins in plants, yeast, and even goats, according to scientists, the product has been less than ideal, lacking the strength and toughness sought in spider silk.
Part of the problem, researchers have noted, is that proteins in spider silk are encoded by long and repetitive sequences of DNA which tend to break down in other hosts.
Structure of spider silk anchors under microscope
Spider silk — which can be as strong as steel, but incredibly light — could be useful on Mars, where space explorers might use it in place of heavy materials that would be expensive and unwieldy to transport from Earth. They could use it to build strong fabrics and possibly even surgical sutures, for example.
A lab led by Fuzhong Zhang at Washington University in St. Louis has produced a spider silk made by microbes that is as tough and strong as natural spider silk.
They're working to scale up production of the spider silk to "be able to produce meters worth, kilometers-long fibers continuously and relatively easily within the lab," said Zhang.
Yes, but: Creating enough spider silk isn't the only challenge ahead for this work. The spider silk production process needs to be contained inside its own fermentor to reduce the risk of contamination, according to Zhang, which could be a technical challenge on Mars.
NASA will also need to protect these microbes from radiation during the journey to Mars.
Another NASA lab is also working to create an easily produced food source for the microbes to fuel their work on the Red Planet.
From here, researchers say they will work on producing other materials — they've already made a protein found in mussels that they say could be used an an underwater adhesive — as well as increasing the yield in each cycle.