Markus Linder says: “In our society, there is a strong desire to use sustainable materials and products. Towards this, there is a large effort to study materials made of biological components. These materials would not result in degradability problems like we see with microplastics. Biological materials also function efficiently as carbon sinks. One of our main challenges is that we need to make these biological materials so that they have very good properties, since inferior materials would not provide a real advantage. Looking at, for example, nacre and silk, which are excellent materials, we know that high performance is in principle possible in fully biological components. Using genetic engineering, we can make new silk proteins, and in this project, we will especially look at how molecules should be designed to best fit industrial production processes. For this, we will use nature’s own mechanisms of selection and evolution. We aim for results that could widely change how materials are produced and used in our society.”