Spiders are amazing animals. There are billions of them around the world, living in many different types of habitats, and they hunt, hide, and generally thrive in many different ways. While many (most?) people are scared of spiders, they are one of our greatest allies when it comes to keeping the insect population down so flies, mosquitos, and other creatures aren’t constantly bothering us.

In addition, some species of spider are able to create silk that is the stronger than Kevlar and has many practical uses (beyond building webs).

So, love them or hate them, spiders are amazing. A group of scientists took their love of spiders and thought that they should make them even more amazing. To do this, they used CRISPR gene editing technology to create the first genetically modified ‘super-spider’.

To do this, the team took edited material and injected it into oocytes, which are in the unfertilized female spiders. When the spiders mated, the offspring had the desired genetically modified traits.

What were the traits? Silk production that glows red.

That’s right, they made it so the spider would have a red fluorescent protein that becomes a part of the spider’s silk. This wasn’t done just because glow in the dark spider silk sounds cool, but because it is an option that has been used with other animals due to the fact that it is easily testable. If the scientists can see the glow, the gene editing worked and was passed on to the baby spiders.

Now that they know that this works, they can look into making other adjustments to the spiders genes to get desired traits. This could include things like making spiders more or less venomous, making them bigger or smaller, or any number of other things. The most likely option, however, is that gene editing will be used to make their silk even stronger than it already is since that has very practical uses as a material.

Professor Dr. Thomas Scheibel is the Chair of Biomaterials at the University of Bayreuth and was the senior author of the study. In a statement, he said:

“We have demonstrated, for the first time worldwide, that CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to incorporate a desired sequence into spider silk proteins, thereby enabling the functionalisation of these silk fibers. The ability to apply CRISPR gene-editing to spider silk is very promising for materials science research – for example, it could be used to further increase the already high tensile strength of spider silk.”

Of course, there is always the risk that some ‘mad scientist’ will put the gene editing to work for evil intent, creating a monstrous spider that is highly aggressive, but that almost never happens anywhere except the movies.

The study that was written about the genetically modified spiders as published in Angewandte Chemie. The remarkable success will undoubtedly lead to more genetically modified creatures in the future.

So far, there are no plans to try to turn this success into a real life spiderman.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.