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Business Weekly hears from the industry that brings viruses back from the dead. The world of biotechnology is rapidly evolving - it recreates the stuff we can’t necessarily touch and feel, like smells and bacteria. Can it help contain future pandemics? Manuela Saragosa explores the risks and opportunities. We also head backstage at the theatre - many shows are having to come up with novel ways to perform productions, but are they able to sustain a business under social distancing rules? Rob Young speaks to the artistic director of the world famous Royal Albert Hall in London’s West End about their plans to ensure shows carry on.

Can spider silk and grasshopper rubber, brewed by vats of genetically modified microbes, wean us off our addiction to oil-based plastics?Manuela Saragosa explores what sounds like an environmentalist sci-fi utopia. She speaks to Daniel Meyer, head of corporate planning at Spiber, a Japanese company that is already trying to commercialise clothes and car parts made of synthetic spider silk. Meanwhile Christophe Schilling, chief executive of California-based Genomatica, is using a similar biotechnology to manufacture good old-fashioned nylon.But there is one potential problem: The microbes that make these fantastic new materials need to be fed lots and lots of sugar - but where will it all come from? Agnieszka Brandt-Talbot of Imperial College in London thinks she has an answer, and it involves that most sugary of substances - wood.Producer: Laurence Knight(Picture: Close up of a Furrow Spider on its web in a Pennsylvania meadow in summer; Credit: Cwieders/Getty Images)

Genetically modified microbes could herald a new industrial revolution - but the technology also poses new dangers.Manuela Saragosa speaks to someone who used it to recreate the horsepox virus - a close cousin of smallpox - from scratch three years ago. Virologist David Evans explains why he did it, and what aspects of this rapidly evolving technology worry him most.One of the companies on the cutting edge is Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks. It redesigns the DNA of bacteria and yeast in order to create everything from perfumes to fertilisers. Ginkgo's Patrick Boyle tells Manuela what they are doing to ensure that the microbes and DNA they create remain harmless.Producer: Laurence Knight(Picture: Anonymous vial containing a clear liquid; Credit: MirageC/Getty Images)