![]() Spider silk is biocompatible, biodegradable, strong and elastic, which makes it ideal for biomedical applications. However, harvesting of silk from spiders is not feasible for large scale industrial purposes and current biotechnological approaches face problems with low recombinant protein yields as well as difficulties reproducing the native mechanisms of fibre spinning. The aim of the present project is to develop a novel method based on bioconjugation with polyethylene glycol for obtaining chemically modified artificial spider silk in a biomimetic way. The developed method would have several advantages in comparison to a purely biotechnological approach as it would ease recombinant spider silk protein (spidroin) expression in bacteria by circumventing the requirement for all three spidroin domains, allow crosslinking between spidroins as well as easy tuning of material properties by varying the bioconjugation reaction conditions. Successful implementation of the project will contribute to the development of several defined specialization areas of the Latvian Smart Specialization Strategy (RIS3) – biomedicine, medical technologies, biopharmacy and biotechnology. The project results will be applicable to development of new biomaterials with potentially broad applications in biomedicine and nanotechnology and thereby contribute to transformation of economy of Latvia towards high added value products. |
Project implementation updates201911th of March – signing of contract about project implementation. 202024th of January – lecture for participants of Latvian State Biology Olympiad about the project and our obtained results. More info here. 202115th of April – Presentation “Artificial spider silk – its potential as a biomaterial” at the conference “Deep Tech Atelier 2021“. |
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