Artificial Spinning of Spider Silk

The elaborate structure of spider silk

“…At first wet-spinning processes were employed with promising results. 67,68 Using silicon micro-spinnerets several meters of insect or spider silk fibers could be produced. Although the wet-spun silks visually resembled natural ones, their diameter was up to ten times bigger than naturally occurring silks (and not for the other spider silks), it is time consuming and highly expensive, especially since most spiders are cannibals, rendering farming costly.…”

“…62,69 Until now, even the best mechanical properties obtained by artificial spinning techniques are much lower than that of natural dragline silks. 68 Exceeding nature-proteins as polymer materials. Spiders mainly employ silk as linear thread.…”

The molecular structure of spider dragline silk: Folding and orientation of the protein backbone

“…Progress in genetic engineering (4-7) and the emerging understanding of the spinning process (7)(8)(9)(10) have created the prospect of producing artificial spider silk or silk-like highperformance materials (6,11). The molecular structure that leads to the functional properties of the material and the mechanism by which nature assembles this structure, however, are far from being understood.…”

Mimicking biopolymers on a molecular scale: nano(bio)technology based on engineered proteins

“…The modular system enabled the production of specifically engineered proteins with tailor-made properties for experimental analysis (Rammensee et al 2008;. Several attempts have been made to spin recombinant spider silk proteins, including hand drawing (Shao et al 2003;Teule et al 2007), wet spinning and electrospinning (Seidel et al 1998;Lazaris et al 2002;Wang et al 2004). In most of these cases, the mechanical properties of such silk fibres were not comparable with the natural template.…”