CSIRO scientist Dr Tara Sutherland and her team have achieved another important milestone¹ in the international quest（追求，寻找） to artificially produce insect silk. They have hand-drawn² fine threads of honeybee silk from a 'soup' of silk proteins that they had produced transgenically.

These threads were as strong as threads drawn from the honeybee silk gland³（腺） , a significant step towards development of coiled coil（卷轴螺旋） silk biomaterials（生物材料） .

"It means that we can now seriously consider the uses to which these biomimetic materials can be put," Dr Sutherland said.

"We used recombinant（重组） cells of bacterium⁴（细菌） E. coli to produce the silk proteins which, under the right conditions, self-assembled into similar structures to those in honeybee silk.

"We already knew that honeybee silk fibres could be hand-drawn from the contents of the silk gland so used this knowledge to hand-draw fibres from a sufficiently⁵ concentrated and viscous⁶（粘性的） mixture of the recombinant silk proteins.

"In fact, we had to draw them twice to produce a translucent⁷（半透明的） stable fibre."

Dr Sutherland said numerous efforts have been made to express other invertebrate⁸（无脊椎的） silks in transgenic systems but the complicated structure of the silk genes⁹ in other organisms means that producing silk outside silk glands¹⁰ is very difficult.

"We had previously¹¹ identified the honeybee silk genes and knew that that the silk was encoded by four small non-repetitive（重复的） genes – a much simpler arrangement which made them excellent candidates for transgenic silk production."

Possible practical uses for these silks would be tough, lightweight textiles, high-strength applications such as advanced composites for use in aviation（航空，飞机制造业） and marine¹² environments, and medical applications such as sutures（手术缝合线，针脚） , artificial tendons（肌腱） and ligaments（韧带） .