Synthetic spider silk could advance sustainable apparel

Since engineering recombinant spider silk in 2018 using bacteria, Fuzhong Zhang, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, has been working to increase the yield of silk threads produced from microbes while maintaining its properties of enhanced strength and toughness.

Higher yields will be critical if synthetic silk is to be used in everyday applications, particularly in the fashion industry where renewable materials are in demand to stem the environmental impacts that come from producing an estimated 100 billion garments and 92 million tons of waste annually.

Using an engineered mussel foot protein, Zhang has created new spider silk fusion proteins dubbed bi-terminal Mfp fused silks (btMSilks). Microbial production of btMSilks is said to have had eightfold higher yields than recombinant silk proteins, and the btMSilk fibres have improved strength and toughness while being lightweight. The findings have been published in Nature Communications.

“The outstanding mechanical properties of natural spider silk come from its very large and repetitive protein sequence,” Zhang said in a statement. “However, it is extremely challenging to ask fast-growing bacteria to produce a lot of repetitive proteins.

“To solve this problem, we needed a different strategy,” he said. “We went looking for disordered proteins that can be genetically fused to silk fragments to promote molecular interaction, so that strong fibres can be made without using large repetitive proteins. And we actually found them right here in work we’ve already been doing on mussel foot proteins.”

Mussels secrete specialised proteins on their feet to stick to things. Zhang and his collaborators have engineered bacteria to produce them and engineer them as adhesives for biomedical applications. Mussel foot proteins are also cohesive, which enables them to stick to each other well. By placing mussel foot protein fragments at the ends of his synthetic silk protein sequences, Zhang created a less repetitive, lightweight material that is at least twice as strong as recombinant spider silk.

The yields on Zhang’s material increased eightfold compared with past studies, reaching 8g of fibre material from 1L of bacterial culture. This output constitutes enough fabric to test for use in real products.

“The beauty of synthetic biology is that we have lots of space to explore,” Zhang said. “We can cut and paste sequences from various natural proteins and test these designs in the lab for new properties and functions. This makes synthetic biology materials much more versatile than traditional petroleum-based materials.”

Zhang and his team will now expand the tuneable properties of their synthetic silk fibres to meet the exact needs of each specialised market.

“Because our synthetic silk is made from cheap feedstock using engineered bacteria, it presents a renewable and biodegradable replacement for petroleum-derived fibre materials like nylon and polyester,” Zhang said.