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I Grew Real Spider Silk Using Yeast

The Thought Emporium · 2.9M views · 2020-09-22 · 32:47

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Overview

The Thought Emporium shows how they engineered a yeast strain to produce real spider silk, after more than two years of lab work and many failures. The video explains the genetic engineering process behind it.

On Hacker News

HN commenters cite it as proof that cutting-edge biotech is becoming accessible to home labs, much like computing in the 1980s.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2020–2022

Topics

Biology & biotechnologyMaterials science
Search by tags
spider silkgenetic engineeringyeastdiy biologysynthetic biology

What people said

TheJoeMan · 2020-12 · Recommendation

I watched this cool youtube video by Thought Emporium where he makes custom spider silk: [VIDEO] Just seems like he reads the manufacturer's instructions!

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jcims · 2020-12 · Recommendation

With a germ you can kill a few million people - [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] If you want to see someone do cool stuff with the above: [LINK] [VIDEO]

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ben_w · 2022-04 · Reference

I don’t think anyone physically could horde it for even as long as 20 years no matter how hard they tried. Tech has a way of diffusing rapidly — things that start off only affordable by the richest yuppies of Wall Street and London can be superseded by street-wares in Nairobi, and this is not limited to just computers and phones, for example one of the YouTube channels I follow genetically engineered yeast to produce spider silk: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by The Thought Emporium, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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