working since 2020

e-silk: electrically conductive spider silk

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Spider silk is a biomaterial with excellent physical properties such as high tensile strength, stretchiness, and toughness. Because of the fierce nature of spiders, the current method of industrial spider silk production involves producing recombinant spidroins (spider silk proteins) in bacterial systems and spinning them into silk.

This project is about developing a novel application of spider silk: spider silk with electrical conductivity. By taking advantage of genetic engineering techniques, I am creating a recombinant spider silk protein that will be expressed in E.coli and have an affinity towards gold nanoparticles. When bound to the gold nanoparticles, the spidroins will be electrically conductive because of gold's electrical conductivity. 

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The reason for implementing electrical conductivity into spider silk is that it can be used in clothing to create circuits or expand the current applications of smart fabrics. Some examples include: stretch sensors, functional buttons, and circuitry that can activate a small device. I started this project in 2020 and in summer 2022, I completed an intership at Amino Labs in Canada where I managed to produce synthetic spider silk (see pictures and videos below), using hardware that I personally built: a programmable micro-syringe pump with a capture roller, inspired by the OpenSyringePump developed by Naroom. The device is now open source and you may find it in GitHub, including the assembly guide. This project is still underway and you can read more about my research in this paper.

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Acknowledgements

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Thank you so much to my mentor Justin Pahara PhD, co-founder of Amino Labs, for providing me with the guidance and counsel I needed to conduct the research on this project.

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Many thanks to Gustavo Plaza PhD, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, for sharing his experience and insights from his research with synthetic spider silk.