The research group of Qian Zhigang and Xia Xiaoxia of Shanghai Jiaotong University cooperated to establish a production platform for efficient secretion of spider silk protein

Recently, the research group of Qian Zhigang and Xia Xiaoxia from the School of Life Science and Technology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University published a paper entitled Secretory production of spider silk proteins in metabolically engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum for spinning into tough fibers in the well-known journal "Metabolic Engineering" in the field of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.

Spider silk, which has the reputation of "biosteel", not only has mechanical properties that surpass other natural and man-made fibers, but also has good biocompatibility and degradability, so it has important application prospects in the fields of aviation, national defense and biomaterials.

This study established a high-efficiency production platform for spidroin production using Corynebacterium glutamicum as the host for the first time (Figure 1)

Figure 1.

Inspired by spider-secreted protein silk formation, the study uses Corynebacterium glutamicum with biosafety (GRAS) and high secretion efficiency to produce spider silk proteins, which not only avoids the poor water solubility and recycling of spider silk proteins caused by long-term retention in cells in the past The problems of high cost and low yield, and a new way to prepare high-performance artificial silk from low molecular weight spider silk protein has been established, which provides a new opportunity for the green and sustainable synthesis and application of spider silk protein materials

This research was supported by the National Key R&D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology (2020YFA0907702) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22075179 and 32071414)

Paper link: https://doi.