Genome Editing Advances the Structural Study of Silk.

We first applied the genome edited silkworm silk (GE-silk) to interpret X-ray fiber diagram, and implied a great potential for the application of genome editing technology to the structural study of silk. The origin of a weak meridional layer-line streak with a spacing of ∼21 Å, observed in the X-ray fiber diagram of Bombyx mori silkworm silk, has been widely believed but not experimentally proven to be a period of the pseudostructure associated with the occurrence of serine residues at regular intervals in a hexapeptide repeating unit -G-A-G-A-G-S-. The above hypothesis was experimentally demonstrated from X-ray measurements of GE-silk.