Nadia Drake | June 20, 2013 | Wired Magazine
Silkworms in a Japanese lab are busy spinning silks that glow in the dark. But these silkworms, unlike others that have been fed rainbow-colored dyes, don’t need any dietary interventions to spin in color: They’ve been genetically engineered to produce fluorescent skeins in shades of red, orange, and green.
Malcolm Fraser, a molecular biologist at the University of Notre Dame, suggests that while the fluorescent silks are interesting, they’d be even better, and more practical, if the colors were more robust. In 2011, Fraser and his colleagues engineered a silkworm that spun spider silk.