Silkworm

With its high tinsel strength and elasticity, spider silk could be a useful material in medicine-not only for sutures, but perhaps for making artificial muscle, cartilage, tendon and ligament.  Researchers at the Universities of Notre Dame and Wyoming, and Kraig Biocraft Laboratories (Lansing, MI), with the aim of producing spider silk in greater quantities, used recombinant DNA techniques to create a transgenic silkworm (transferring a transposon from the spider) that can spin out the stronger fiber as they would their natural thread.   MORE

Image Credit:  ND Newswire and QMed.com