Leveraging the same biotech stack that enabled the rapid development and rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, scientists at Donghua University have genetically engineered silk worms to produce spider silk.

At 6x the toughness of Kevlar, spider silk is a supermaterial. However, as the teams involved in providing spider silk for fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore will attest, harvesting it in any useful quantity is no easy feat. Silk worms, on the other hand, have been used in the mass production of silk for millennia, through a process known as sericulture.