Rita Chuang is a chemistry graduate from UC Berkeley now serving as Project Lead at a Japanese biotech company called Spiber Inc. Spiber was founded in 2007 with the goal of replicating spider silk and its superior mechanical properties by fermenting fibrous silk proteins in microorganisms instead of farming silkworms or spiders. Rita is now working in frontiers development at Spiber on some of their highly innovative projects to do with Spiber’s Brewed Protein™ product. She talks to us about the realistic challenges faced when engineering microbes to produce fibrous proteins for textiles, Spiber's partners such as fashion designer Yuima Nakazato, and the wide range of materials that Spiber can replicate beyond silk using their fermentation and spinning processes.
Website: https://www.spiber.inc/en/
Rita Chuang is a chemistry graduate from UC Berkeley now serving as Project Lead at a Japanese biotech company called Spiber Inc. Spiber was founded in 2007 with the goal of replicating spider silk and its superior mechanical properties by fermenting fibrous silk proteins in microorganisms instead of farming silkworms or spiders. Rita is now working in frontiers development at Spiber on some of their highly innovative projects to do with Spiber’s Brewed Protein™ product. She talks to us about the realistic challenges faced when engineering microbes to produce fibrous proteins for textiles, Spiber's partners such as fashion designer Yuima Nakazato, and the wide range of materials that Spiber can replicate beyond silk using their fermentation and spinning processes.
Website: https://www.spiber.inc/en/