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.