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Home » Science » Scientists Create ‘the Spider-Goat’ to Farm Silk

Scientists Create ‘the Spider-Goat’ to Farm Silk

January 17, 2012 by Andy T 2 Comments

Spider-goatIn a blasphemous slight on creationism, scientists have combined spider and goat genes to produce the ‘spider-goat‘, an unorthodox creature that fires silky milk from its udders.

The bizarre billy hails from Utah State University, where genetics professor Randy Lewis and his team took the silk gene from an orb-weaver spider and placed it in the DNA of a goat’s udder.

This genetic mutation was then inserted into an egg and implanted in a mother goat, resulting in what Randy terms “advanced farming: breeding animals to produce things we want”.

The ‘things’ in this case being dragline silk, an amazingly strong and applicable product produced by spiders and used for human ligament repair, as well as the prevention of inflammation and disease.

To extract the silk, the goat’s milk is taken to a lab where it is processed until only silk proteins remain. The silk then gets spooled onto a reel before it’s sent off to do its bidding.

All good and well, but why not just farm spiders instead of engineering a ‘spoat’ or a ‘gider’ that’s unlikely to be accepted at either animals’ playground?

Spiders are impossible to farm, says Randy, due to their “very cannibalistic” nature.

Enter the placidly compliant goat, a sucker for human experiments, and now, it appears, a squirter of human benevolence.

While the research is generally being hailed as an evolutionary breakthrough, Sam Winston, from the Biological Asylum for Anomalous Animals (BAAA), has labelled it a “dangerous abhorrence”.

He says unforeseen side-effects (covered up by the media) have resulted in the goats scaling walls and head-butting office windows, only to terrify staff before eating years of important research.

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Filed Under: Science Tagged With: goat, spider

Comments

  1. Cecil Bloodstone says

    February 4, 2012 at 09:49

    Dear Andy,
    Finally a feel good science story (I am so sick of those tedious aids and cancer research conferences). Great science is always fun and tempts mother nature to do better! Lets splice an ink squirting octopus with a ball point pen….for refillable pens. Perhaps bees and cows could breed for that lovely honey flavoured milk we all love…or mix ants and elephants for really big ants (or minute elephats). I can see so much promise in this work, Huge hoorays for the USA!!
    Lots of affection,
    Cecil B

    Reply
  2. Andy Tope says

    February 4, 2012 at 12:35

    Cecil!

    You don’t know how happy this comment makes me feel. To have a fan, oh to have a fan.

    As I sit here eating a watermelon and pondering the waters of life, I have received a comment.

    A comment!

    Oh blessed are the days to ye and me. Cheers to biological fusion, and to dusting the barren crevices of this tiny blog log amidst such a dense forest.

    Yours,

    Reply

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