Scientists have tried to make the best fabric by using spiders genes

[Ali Inam]

I read on the net about how scientists have tried to make the best fabric by using spiders genes.

They took a gene from the spider and inserted it into a goat's gene and then the milk which the goat gave, contained some silkiness, from which, after processing, scientists managed to extract the thread-like substance.

Any info regarding this process ? !

 

[zhermes]

That's a very broad topic, "recombinant dna", "genetic engineering" and "transgenesis"
Is there something in particular you are wondering about?

 

[Ali Inam]

Ah, well I was aiming towards the transferring of a gene from one creature to another.

 

[zhermes]

I have no idea how they did it (there are numerous ways), but using stem cells is one of the most effective and common methods. The overall idea is to use tools that were created in nature (proteins from different species) in a novel combination.

1) You can use a protein called a "restriction enzyme" to extract a certain gene from one species' DNA.

2) In bacteria you can literally just inject that gene into a cell, and occationally it will be integrated into the bacterial DNA, with other more complex organisms you use additional proteins or even whole viruses --> but in any case you add the gene to a target cell

3) if the target cell which gains the gene of interest is an embryonic stem cell (ESC), you can then inject that ESC into the "blastocyst" (the stage of a zygote just after fertilization of an egg) and it will contribute to the new organism which is a "chimera"--it has DNA from its parents (the unaltered blastocyst) in addition to the ESC you added.

4) Finally you cross-breed numerous of these chimera's to produce an organism with only the injected DNA.

So that's the bare bones basic concepts in this type of procedure, again its not necessarily how this particular study performed it; but it conveys some of the basic ideas.