Scientists Created Mutant 'Super-Spiders' That Produce Glowing Red Silk

The World's First Genetically Modified Spider Spins Glowing Red Silk

By now, CRISPR has sliced and diced its way through the genomes of everything from bananas to beagles to babies. CRISPR tech’s latest target is the humble and terrifying spider. Scientists gave spiders red, glow-in-the-dark silk so we can finally have an organic option when selecting Halloween decorations. At the University of Bayreuth, a team of researchers successfully edited the DNA of the common house spider (Parasteatoda tepidariorum) to sp…

Scientists Created Mutant 'Super-Spiders' That Produce Glowing Red Silk

Spider-web-with-dewdrops-in-morning Scientists used CRISPR gene editing technology to make spiders produce glowing red silk. They did this in an effort to eventually have spiders create “supermaterials” for use in a wide range of applications and in industries such as textiles, medicine, and aerospace. The results of this new research, published in the scientific journal Angewandte Chemie, reveal they were able to do this using just a species of…

The world’s first genetically modified spider could lead to new ‘supermaterials’

Researchers funded by the U.S. Navy have used gene-editing technology to make house spiders produce red fluorescent silk. This might seem like a quirky scientific novelty, but the breakthrough is a critical step toward modifying spider silk properties and creating new “supermaterials” for industries ranging from textiles to aerospace. The team at Germany’s University of Bayreuth, led by Professor Thomas Scheibel, successfully applied CRISPR-Cas9…

For the first time, scientists have managed to genetically modify a spider, now able to weave a fluorescent red silk. A promising step forward...

If you've always had chills about crossing a spider, here's news that might add a bit of science fiction to your phobia. Researchers recently created the very first genetically modified spider thanks to the famous CRISPR-Cas9 technology. But that's not all: this spider now produces [...]

While the genetic publishing technology CRISPR-Cas9 has changed many fields of biology, it has so far never been applied to spiders. A team of researchers have just crossed this course by managing to genetically modify a common domestic species, so that it produces a fluorescent red silk. An advance that could lead to new applications in material science. The CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technique has been u…