2018-10-11

[public] 156K views, 7.70K likes, 63.0 dislikes audio only

The Thought Emporium

This week we kick off the start of the spider beer project which is the big genetic engineering project I've been talking about. For this weeks video I'll be going over the whole project and what it's going to take to make it work. The project is relatively straight forward. We'll be taking a silk gene out of black widow spiders, and building a plasmid that makes it express in a species of yeast so that it can be produced en mass easily.

This isn't the end of the project though. Once we make it through the above, there are more changes and tweaks we'll be making, but this is the first goal post and will be a major success if it works. Once this plasmid is built it will be released for those interested to play around with and modify for their own projects.

In theory the whole procedure will be done in about 2 days once the last of the materials arrive, but since this is biology I'm assuming it'll take far longer to actually succeed.

And when all's said and done, I'm planning to write a paper on all of this with my collaborator and publish it in a peer reviewed journal.

Once I'm comfortable working with these silk sequences we'll explore silks from other species like spider mites, and may eventually move past yeast and start modifying silk worms to produce these silks instead of their native variants. We'll also explore extracting and spinning fibers from the silk we produce in yeast.

Some links:

PCR - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction

Gibson assembly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_assembly

Overview of recombinant spider silks - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3815454/

Pklac2 plasmid backbone - https://www.neb.com/products/n3742-pklac2-vector#Product%20Information

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