Also check out our transgenesis paper where we generated glowing silk glands.
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Huge thanks to Whitney Stoppel and Lauren Eccles at UF for the microCT scans, and to the NSF for funding this work

This might mean that silk is coated with an enzyme that predigests the starchy habitats that the pantry moth loves to colonize (as you might know 😬)

Interestingly, we also found that this maltase enzyme (magenta), involved in starch digestion, is produced towards the silk exit.

This may be why silky larval colonies stay clean. Believe it or not but this infested mix of bran, yeast, sugar, and glycerol still smells like breakfast cereals after 28 days.

We also started to discover some potential silk additives. For example, Seroin1 and Spi are expressed throughout the gland and thought to be microbial inhibitors.

These transcriptomes specialize in the production of secreted fibroins and sericins. In very high amounts.

Then we did RNAseq across this boundary.
Some key findings : the silk gland makes the core silk fiber and then adds three layers of packaging around it.
- posterior : high expression of genes for silk fibroin production 🧵
- 2 middle regions rich in sticky proteins called sericins

We now sometimes call it the Cookie Monster boundary…

And this started to reveal very sharp boundaries in the gland between specialized domains, for example between the posterior fibroin-producing cells (PSG) and the middle silk gland (MSG)

Fun fact: you can get nuclear signal with intronic probes, labeling lots of transcriptional hubs in these megaploid nuclei (magenta)

To look at spatial gene expression, we used RNA HCR probes (@hcrimaging.bsky.social). This labelled the sub-domains of the gland including this posterior region specialized in making silk fiber proteins.

Silk glands are epithelial tubes made of giant cells. These cells have giant polyploid nuclei (blue) made of thousands of genome copies, and are wrapped around a lumen (yellow), in which they dump silk proteins

Huge thanks to @hfspo.bsky.social for funding this work

website back to normal, phew ! 🙇

here we go, polygenic scores 😬
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Ironically, any amount of zygotic genome editing would be followed up by a round of pre-implantation genome sequencing anyway, to ensure that edits are correct and free of off-targets.

They don't explain any of this conundrum in their ethics statement or investor pitches. It's a scam.