For your visual pleasure: silk protein crystals. 🐛❄️

AND before @BoltThreads was Bolt Threads, did you know they had a button on their website that let you add unicorns and rainbows to the page!? 🥰🦄🌈

15/ Read more:

14/ What success looks like: creams, serums, and aerosols that stay protect skin, hair, and tissue against freezing temperatures, and the same proteins enabling ice-shedding coatings and seals built for extreme cold-weather ops.

13/ Our loop: Design → test → learn → redesign → deploy. Rapid cycles link protein sequence, formulation, and real-world performance.

10/ Plain-English mechanism: Think of IBPs as molecular snow tires. They grab onto specific ice faces and block the easy growth directions. Ice is forced to grow awkwardly—or not at all—so crystals stay small and less sticky.

9/ Bolt’s role: Formulate and stress-test those proteins—mix them into coatings and fluids, run freeze��thaw and flow tests, and measure practical outcomes in commercial formulations.

8/ Ginkgo’s role: Design and build libraries of new ice-modulating proteins, inspired by nature but tuned for performance. High-throughput screens pick winners across salts, pH, and additives.

7/ Why engineer new ones? Natural IBPs evolved for specific niches. Real applications add salt, surfactants, shear, pH swings, and temperature cycling. We need variants that stay active in those conditions.

6/ Already in the world: • Ice cream: “ice structuring proteins” help keep crystals tiny → smoother texture. • Cryopreservation: explored to reduce freeze–thaw damage. • Frozen foods & frost control: help maintain texture and limit freezer burn.

5/ Why this matters: Big crystals = damage (in cells, foods, coatings). Small, controlled crystals = better texture, less cracking, safer surfaces.

4/ Two lab metrics of interest: • Thermal hysteresis (TH): proteins lower the effective freezing point without changing the melting point. • Ice recrystallization inhibition (IRI): proteins keep small ice crystals from coarsening during holds.

3/ What does attachment do? • Slows or stops crystal growth • Keeps small crystals from merging into big ones • Nudges crystals into less sticky shapes

2/ What are IBPs? Proteins from fish, insects, plants, fungi, and bacteria that attach to ice crystals.

1/ @bolt_bslk + @Ginkgo have teamed up in @DARPA's ICE program to tackle a simple idea with big impact: use ice-binding proteins (IBPs)—the same molecules organisms use—to manage ice in tough, real-world conditions. 🧵

This is my new favorite thread

Our latest collaborative paper with David Baker's lab is now live in Cell Biomaterials (@CellBiomat, Cell Press)! Check out "Stimuli-triggered Formation of De Novo-designed Protein Biomaterials"! 🔓 : https://t.co/GSSJPePbgX

Huge thanks to the @agihouse_org crew for hosting!

It’s messy and early, but it points to a world where: 🧬 Proteins are programmable ⚙️ Materials can be tuned in real time 💡 Biology becomes design infrastructure

Then it optimizes each sequence across competing factors like β-sheet content, charge, flexibility, and processability; nudging them toward balance, not perfection.

PeptideForge pulls functional peptide motifs from public databases (the LEGO blocks of protein materials) and assembles them toward desired properties.