THE HEART OF BOLT THREADS , however , is innovation . The company designs biomaterials at the molecular level and scales them to commercial quantities . It ’ s an end-to-end process — discovering something in a lab , then problemsolving and developing means that allow for mass production . Founded in 2010 , Bolt Threads is now venturing into the production realm , but that was only after Breslauer spent some time wandering in the research wilderness .
After earning a degree in bioengineering , the Revelle College alumnus began graduate work at UC Berkeley in computational biology , which involves the application of computer science to the modeling of the structures and processes of life .
“ I wanted to get my hands dirty and actually build things ,” he recalls . One of those things was a microfluidic device — essentially a chemistry or biology lab compressed to the size of a microchip . Breslauer had kept an eye out for what kind of chip to make , and biomimetics — replicating nature to improve engineering for new materials , devices , and systems — was hot .
“ I kept my eyes on spiders ,” he says . “ How do they make such interesting fibers so easily ? After searching through the literature , I learned that the way a spider makes silk — how it turns the silk molecule into a fiber , that is — was very similar to the microfluidic devices I was learning to make . So I thought , how can I replicate a silk gland with a microdevice ?”
Breslauer built a device that operated like a silk gland , but he needed spider silk polymer to test it . Then he heard about two guys at UC San Francisco who were programming a microbe to make silk protein .
“ Total serendipity ,” Breslauer says . “ They were trying to make silk protein , I was trying to make silk protein into fiber . It all went from there .”
But talk about trial and error : The three founders of Bolt Threads each spent five years in graduate school figuring out how to work with silk , and after that , “ We really started the company rebuilding our entire technology from scratch ,” Breslauer says . Because while a college lab may offer tools that allow for developing devices quickly , that path doesn ’ t necessarily lead to the ability to mass produce .
THE WEB WE WEAVE Designer Stella McCartney and Bolt Threads collaborated on this dress using synthetic spider silk ( above ) for New York ’ s Museum of Modern Art .
“ The lab tools will never scale up , and the chemicals that work very well on the lab bench , turns out you can ’ t use them on a large scale ,” because they ’ re too expensive or not necessarily safe , Breslauer says . “ It was a lot of painstaking development .”
Which is understandable , given the ambitious endeavor to replicate arachnid evolution . Spiders have silk-producing glands in their abdomen that contain a liquid form of the chemical components to produce silk . When a spider wants to produce a length of solid silk , it uses special combs on its legs to pull out a solid strand .
Bolt Threads has no such glands and leg combs . What the company does instead is create DNA sequences that mimic spider silk proteins , which become a yeast that is brewed and can grow rapidly as it ferments . In this process , the yeasts make protein that is ultimately extracted into threads .
In other words , it ’ s a protein-based microfiber inspired by spider silk , as opposed to the hydrocarbon-based microfiber we all know as polyester .
24 TRITON | WINTER 2021