Can GM Bacteria produce animal textiles

[oreolvrs]

i know that bacteria have been engineered to produce spider silk but could the same be done for silkworm silk and other animal textiles such as wool.

Ps im aware that algea can make paper and cotton substitutes thus meaning plant textiles are not a problem

[Jens]

In principle yes but there are (at least) the following issues:

 

1) If the animal gene contains introns you have to remove them since introns are not managed at all in bacteria

 

2) If the protein you want to have is only functional with post-translational amino-acid modifications (which is actually not so rare with structural proteins you are talking about) it will most likely not work, since they are not carried out at all (or at least not the same way) in Bacteria.

 

3) The fiber proteins you are talking about are most likely either to short if expressed in a bacteria and difficult to combine to longer fibers artificially later. For the same reason the protein might actually kill the bacteria before you have reached concentration levels which are useful for industry.

 

so it is not straight forward....