Tougher than steel and Kevlar, the silk of the black widow spider has long been coveted by manufacturing companies, defense contractors and comic-book reading nerds as a possible material of the future.
Scientists have spent years decoding pieces of the spiders' silk making genes, but now Nadia Ayoub and a group of researchers at the University of California-Riverside can create the full proteins and probably spider silk as well.
You want to manufacture my what!?
The silk making genes turn out to be quite long (over 10,000 base-pairs), but with very few introns or "junk DNA" sections that…
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