“The silk more typically known to people might be silk worm silk that is used in the textile industry. These are silk cocoons that are made by the mulberry caterpillar. [It] forms a cocoon around itself and you can get about a kilometre out of it. Silk worm silk needs to be 4 times stronger to be as good as spider silk. What [researchers] are trying to do it is to take spider silk genes and put them into silk worms. They have found the protein composition is only part of the story and a large part is the processing [by the silk worm or spider]. So [the resulting product] is actually more similar to silk worm silk as you’ve got a similar process.” – Beth Mortimer, Oxford Silk Group