Unraveling the Weave of Spider Silk

Ion and seed dependent fibril assembly of a spidroin core domain

“…Spider silk is a high-performance protein fiber with outstanding mechanical and biological properties (Kaplan et al, 1993;Lewis, 1996). Female orb web spiders can produce up to seven silk types in different glands, and five of these are used to build an orb web.…”

Remarkable Natural Material Surfaces and Their Engineering Potential

“…Chemical synthesis is not realistic with the current level of knowledge that chemists have of spider silk. Extracting it from living spiders is very ineffi cient (Lewis 2001 ). The golden cape introduced at the beginning of this chapter, which took 8 years and one million spiders to make, is a perfect example of how long the process would take to make just one garment.…”

Spider Silk for Tissue Engineering Applications

“…Spider silk is a natural material accessed by humans for millennia for various applications. In ancient times, Greeks and Romans stopped the bleeding of battle wounds by covering them with spider silk poultices, and these poultices were also used as an astringent, a styptic and a febrifuge [1,2].…”

“…Female orb-weaving spiders produce up to seven different types of silk using different silk glands and spinnerets located at the posterior end of the spider's abdomen [3]. These seven types of silk have diverse properties depending on their tasks as a protective shelter, dispersal, prey capture device, or as a dragline which the spider uses as a life-line [1,3,4]. Among these seven different silks, major ampullate (MA) silk, which is produced by the major ampullate glands aka as dragline silk, has been investigated in most detail.…”