By engineering silkworms to produce spider silk it's possible to make the super-strong protein fibers at an industrial scale, for applications in medicine like super-strong sutures or tissue engineering or even to make bullet-proof vests stronger than kevlar. The engineered silkworms aren't producing 100% spider silk yet, the silkworms are instead engineered with a copy of the spider silk genes fused directly onto the end of the natural silk gene, so that the silkworm produces a silk that is a mix of the two proteins. The spider/worm silk fusion, however, does have many improved properties, and new genetic engineering technologies can potentially improve this even further and create other novel silks not found in nature.
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Engineering Hybrid Silks : Oscillator
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