I've been looking into other ways of creating my own protein solution. Nothing I've found would be feasible, due to expenses, availability of materials, etc. The only semi-possible way would be to harvest naturally-occurring spider silk, dissolve it into an aqueous solution, use the lyophilization process to purify it, then resuspend the resulting powder in HFIP solvent to create a usable dope. Now, I can't do this at home. I highly, highly doubt SMU would let me use their labs/chemicals. Even if they did, I wouldn't be able to collect spider silk. Collect silk from webs just hanging around would be mean to the spiders, not to mention dirty, and harvesting them directly from the actual spiders seems inhumane to me (even though it has been done multiple times before).
I did pretty much finish my mid-term thesis report. It's already three pages just in one sitting. I'll still add to it as I progress and turn it in on the deadline (or maybe earlier to get it out of the way). It's just nice to know that I have a good portion of it finished.
- Noah
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