Talk:CH391L/S13/Biologically Inspired Materials

• Kevin Baldridge 17:25, 8 April 2013 (EDT):I remember reading about a self-healing carbon fiber-based material a few years ago. There were small pockets of the raw materials which would self assemble to heal a macro-scale break when the pockets were opened with the macro-scale break. I'll see if I can figure out what exactly it was
  • Kevin Baldridge 17:34, 8 April 2013 (EDT):I think this is the original material I was thinking of, but in looking for it I found a more synthetic-bio related material that incorporates bacteria here
    • Kevin Baldridge 17:49, 8 April 2013 (EDT):Maybe that's the iGem thing you mentioned...
      • Gabriel Wu 02:56, 14 April 2013 (EDT): The iGEM idea is the same, but the implementation is different. The iGEM Newcastle team suggested upregulation of urease genes; whereas, the paper you cite uses calcium lactate as part of a two component "self-healing" concrete strategy (see response to Jeff's comment for details).
• Kevin Baldridge 17:36, 8 April 2013 (EDT):You mention spider silk for use in sutures, would immunogenicity be a problem?
• Aurko Dasgupta 17:51, 8 April 2013 (EDT):How is omniphobicity chemically achieved?
  • Max E. Rubinson 18:26, 10 April 2013 (EDT): There is a difference between the lotus effect and how the SLIPS work. I'm not sure I fully understand, but it sounds like the SLIPS are composed of structures that lock in an intermediary liquid that repels other liquids. I think the lotus effect is depends on the ability of a surface to form contact angles with liquids that result in increased hydrophobicity. Here is the paper describing SLIPS. And here is a link to the Wikipedia page describing contact angles and hydrophobicity.
    • Max E. Rubinson 18:28, 10 April 2013 (EDT): The first link is the same paper Gabe referenced (reference number 14).
• Dwight Tyler Fields 17:52, 8 April 2013 (EDT): Spiders for iGEM!!!
• Aurko Dasgupta 17:53, 8 April 2013 (EDT): Was goat made silk expected to be more economical than microbially produced spider silk?
  • Catherine I. Mortensen 00:16, 12 April 2013 (EDT):I think Gabe mentioned that spiders are just generally difficult to deal with.
    • Gabriel Wu 03:33, 14 April 2013 (EDT): So, typically, to harness a large amount of material, the first attempt is to farm the native organism. Spiders are aggressive and territorial and will eat each other if put in small spaces together (typically necessary when farming anything). Next, the second attempt will be in a microbe, like E. coli or yeast. Spider silk proteins are highly repetitive and poorly matched in codon usage to these microbes. This resulted in small yields and lots of truncated products as recombination becomes a problem in these organisms when there are repetitive sequences present. So, the next step becomes more difficult. Production ideas turn to higher eukaryotes like tissue culture, plants, or transgenic animals. All of these are complicated, expensive, and hard to scale. The advantage of goat's milk is that it's easy to obtain in large amounts and the animal does not need to be killed in the process. So, the short answer, is yes, goat milk silk was "expected" to be economical. The company never actually released a viable silk product, so maybe it wasn't a great expectation.
• Jeffrey E. Barrick 17:59, 8 April 2013 (EDT):How does the carbonate producing Bacillus work? What's the "part" for this?
• Evan Weaver 13:54, 11 April 2013 (EDT): Why is it so hard to synthesize spider silk?
• Benjamin Gilman 16:38, 11 April 2013 (EDT): You talked about it in class, but it's worth mentioning on the page why the spider silk projects haven't worked out, even though they can express the protein in transgenic animals. Aligning the strands, which they've mostly tried to do with an extrusion process, wasn't consistent enough to make strong fibers.
• Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 00:08, 12 April 2013 (EDT):Hey Gabe, do you know anything about the famous Speedo suits used by Olympic athletes, I remember at some point there was some talk about them improving the athlete's speeds as they resemble the smooth skin of a shark.
  • Catherine I. Mortensen 01:25, 12 April 2013 (EDT):I believe it's called FastSkin by Speedo. I found a bunch of articles on it. Here's one that talks about the suit and other bio inspired stuff. [1]
  • Catherine I. Mortensen 01:25, 12 April 2013 (EDT):They should make a FastSkin suit out of spider silk.
• Catherine I. Mortensen 00:20, 12 April 2013 (EDT):Here is an article about spider silk used in the regeneration of nerves. [2]