A Japanese Company May Have Figured Out How to Mass Produce Spider Silk

There's a material out there that is as strong as steel, as stretchy as rubber, extremely shock absorbent, and environmentally friendly. Its source is organically produced and available in nature. It could be used in everything from auto parts, to outerwear, to wound dressing. The textile industry has been unable to produce it in significant quantity—but that may change.

The material in question is spider silk, and because of its incredible scientific properties, people have been trying to reproduce it for years. Using actual spiders is next to impossible, because of their territorial and occasionally cannibalistic habits. But now Japanese startup company Spiber has engineered a truly impressive solution to the problem: altering microorganisms with recombinant spider DNA, so they produce the basic protein that makes up spider silk.

I spoke to several Spiber employees about their efforts by phone. Business developer Daniel Meyer explained the process at length.

"We synthesize the DNA that we design into microorganisms, and then we basically use a fermenting process like you'd use to ferment alcohol, like beer," he told me. "We feed sugar to the microorganisms and then they grow, and they produce the proteins that we've designed."

The protein produced by the microorganisms is then purified into a protein powder (not the sort you'd use to bulk up). The protein powder is put in solution, and the solution is forced through microscopic pores, where it forms the fiber.

Lest you think the product is still mostly in its infancy, Spiber has actually produced a prototype in collaboration with North Face called the Moon Parka. An ethereal gold color, the outer layer of the coat is made entirely from Spiber's synthetic woven spider silk. So while it's yet to be mass-produced, it's been turned into a truly gorgeous, functional prototype.

And as Spiber told me, the potential for synthetic spider silk is huge. Spiders produce different kinds of silk for different purposes, and Spiber actually tweaks spider DNA to get the perfect hybrid for different applications.

"Different aspects of the fibers' properties can be tuned depending on the design of the DNA that we use to create the protein," Executive Officer Kenji Higashi explained. "We have an enormous amount of control over the properties of our materials, because of the proteins that we use at the molecular level."

Another radically different application is car parts. Spiber has already landed a partnership with Kojima Press, a company that supplies auto parts to Toyota. I wondered how something that is technically a textile could be used to make auto parts. Higashi explained that spider silk could replace carbon fibers in fiber-reinforced plastic, or FRP, something commonly used in the auto parts industry.

The benefits to this are twofold. As Meyer told me, "Cars may have the potential to become much lighter and much tougher. You can imagine that could be very useful in a car, if you're in a collision you want a lot of energy to be absorbed, but you also want the car to stay as light as possible, to be the most fuel efficient possible." And fiber-reinforced plastics aren't just used in car parts—they're also used in aerospace engineering, construction, and armor like bulletproof vests. Spider silk is tougher and more shock absorbent than Kevlar.

And because synthetic spider silk is made from organic material, it's much friendlier to the body in medical applications. In March, Motherboard covered a team looking to use spider silk in skin and muscle grafts. And Spiber envisions its material one day replacing the metal pins that hold together badly broken bones.

As Higashi says, "Our vision basically is to make these materials into something that will replace a large portion of the current plastic or synthetic polymer industry. Things like polyester, nylon, et cetera—these materials are petroleum-based in the large part, and that's not sustainable. We need to find alternative ways to make industrial products, and we think that our materials could do that."

Of course, Higashi is dead on. The production of synthetic textiles and plastic is devastating to the environment. And with spider silk's remarkable properties and range of utility, it could become the textile of the future. So maybe the next time you find an arachnid in your bathtub, you should think twice before squashing it.