Spider dragline silk is of practical interest because of its excellent mechanical properties. However, the structure of this material is still largely unknown. In this article, we report what we believe is a new model of the hierarchical structure of silk based on scanning electron microscope and atomic force microscope images. This hierarchical structure includes beta-sheet, polypeptide chain network, and silk fibril. It turns out that an exceptionally high strength of the spider dragline silk can be obtained by decreasing the size of the crystalline nodes in the polypeptide chain network while increasing the degree of orientation of the crystalline nodes. Based on this understanding, how the reeling speed affects mechanical properties of spider dragline silk can be understood properly. Hopefully, the understanding obtained in this study will shed light on the formation of spider silk, and consequently, on the principles for the design of ultrastrong silk.

Spider dragline silk, as a type of high‐performance natural fiber, displays a unique combination of tensile strength and extensibility that gives rise to a greater toughness than any other natural or synthetic fiber. In contrast to silkworm silk, spider dragline silk displays a remarkable strain‐hardening character for which the origin remains unknown. In this paper, the performance of silkworm silk and spider dragline fibers under stretching is compared based on a combined structural and mechanical analysis. The molecular origin of the strain‐hardening of spider silk filaments is addressed in comparison to rubber and Kevlar. Unlike rubber, the occurrence of strain‐hardening can be attributed to the unfolding of the intramolecular β‐sheets in spider silk fibrils, which serve as “molecular spindles” to store lengthy molecular chains in space compactly. With the progressive unfolding and alignment of protein during fiber extension, protein backbones and nodes of the molecular network are stretched to support the load. Consequently the dragline filaments become gradually hardened, enabling efficient energy buffering when an abseiling spider escapes from a predator. As distinct from synthetic materials such as rubber (elastomers), this particular structural feature of spider draglines not only enables quick energy absorption, but also efficiently suppresses the drastic oscillation which occurs upon an impact. The mimicking of this strain‐hardening character of spider silk will give rise to the design and fabrication of new advanced functional materials with applications in kinetic energy buffering and absorption.

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We experimentally study the effects of a uniform electric field on the conformation of single DNA molecules. We demonstrate that a moderate electric field (∼200 V∕cm) strongly compresses isolated DNA polymer coils into isotropic globules. Insight into the nature of these compressed states is gained by following the expansion of the molecules back to equilibrium after halting the electric field. We observe two distinct types of expansion modes: a continuous molecular expansion analogous to a compressed spring expanding, and a much slower expansion characterized by two long-lived metastable states. Fluorescence microscopy and stretching experiments reveal that the metastable states are the result of intramolecular self-entanglements induced by the electric field. These results have broad importance in DNA separations and single molecule genomics, polymer rheology, and DNA-based nanofabrication.DNA conformation | electrophoresis | polymer physics | knots | microfluidic T he use of electric fields to transport DNA has become an essential technique for a variety of research areas including molecular biology, gene therapy, and fundamental studies of polyelectrolytes (1). In most applications, nonlinear electrokinetics (2) due to the interplay of negatively charged DNA and the electric field are neglected. However, Viovy and coworkers (3, 4) demonstrated the ability of an electric field on order of 100 V∕cm to induce strong intermolecular DNA aggregation in a standard electrophoresis buffer in the absence of a sieving matrix. Follow-up studies (5, 6) have attributed the aggregation to an electrohydrodynamic instability triggered by a coupling of macroion (DNA) concentration fluctuations and electric field induced flows beyond the Debye length scale in a moderately concentrated DNA solution (around the DNA overlap concentration c à ). These results shed light onto why it is so difficult to separate large DNA molecules using capillary electrophoresis.Over the last decade there has been a shift from techniques measuring ensemble-averaged molecular properties (e.g., the aforementioned capillary electrophoresis experiments), to techniques that manipulate single, dilute DNA molecules in micro/ nanofluidic devices or nanopores (7-9). Electric fields are a convenient mode to transport DNA as they scale favorably with device dimensions. The long standing belief in such dilute, single molecule experiments is that uniform DC (direct current) electric fields (up to a few hundred V∕cm in standard electrophoresis buffers) do not greatly perturb the conformation of large DNA unless some sort of sieving matrix is used (e.g., gel or microfabricated post array) (1). Numerous fluorescence microscopy experiments confirm this belief to be true [see (10) for a recent review], but are typically limited to field strengths of a few tens of V∕cm to avoid image blur. Much larger electric fields give rise to some chain orientation and possibly some slight chain stretching (11), though the stretching is inconclusive because it is not directly meas...