Spider silk has been something of the Holy Grail for fabrics. If you’re old enough to read this, you’re also likely well aware that it’s among the toughest materials around. It’s also light, flexible, and expensive. Spiders, being tiny, only make a little bit of the stuff. Mass producing it to make ultra-light armor, hyper-strong ropes, or anything else amazingly awesome has been slow going. Until now.

Start-up Bolt Threads and others are hoping to make the fabric on large scales. That’s been thus far complicated by the fact that spiders hate each other. And now, I’m not kidding. Silk worms can be farmed easily because they just nom their leaves and make their cocoons. Then we grab the silk. Spiders, on the other hand, have to be kept separate, meaning that much of the process can’t be automated or streamlined, and each one would require a lot of specialized care.

In the early 90s, there was a push to engineer organisms like goats to make the silk. The hope being that if you could, say, milk a goat for silk, we’d have all the stuff we needed. Some companies were able to kick out prototypes, but little progress has been made beyond that. This time, the issue is that spider silk proteins are just really, really big. The molecules that make up the dragline — the toughest of the seven types of spider silk — are almost twice the size of many standard human or mammalian proteins.

One push has been to make smaller equivalents that are easier for goats and microbes to produce and handle.

“At some point, you lose the mechanical properties as the protein gets smaller,” Randy Lewis, one of the first chemists to clone spider silk gene, told Science Mag.

Some companies, like AMSilk, have begun producing smaller-scale versions that are being used in specialized coatings. One, that’s in clinical trials now, has been used to make breast implants that are essentially invisible to the immune system, dramatically cutting the risk for rejection.

Others, like Bolt Threads, finally believe they can bring the technology to the fashion world. The company has engineered yeast to produce the proteins needed, and then spins the silk into thread thanks to a lengthy process.

Even though these genes originated in spiders, the company hopes to make high performance fabrics, including vegan ones. Many of the better materials for winter coats, for instance, are made with animal products.

The company has pulled in $90 million in capital and grants to pursue its goals, and has even partnered with designer Stella McCartney to help market and produce high-fashion a la spider silk. Bolt claims that it’s well on the way to having their products on store shelves by next year, though they will likely be pretty spendy. A couple years back, Spiber, a Japanese firm for synthetic spider silk announced that they’d sell $1,000 parkas made with the stuff at North Face. That fell through as the company needed more time to perfect their product.

If Bolt has it now (or soon will) it could spark a revolution in fabrics — though it may be a while before the common folk will be able to put down for one.

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