Assembling Spider Silk
11 May 2008, 11:03
Categories: biomimicry nanofibers
A new microfluidics device that works like a spider’s silk duct might finally lead the way to producing industrial quantities of high-quality artificial spider silk. Spider silk is super-light, super-strong and elastic too. Existing human materials lack its useful combination of properties, and proposed uses span everything from bulletproof vests to optic fibres. Researchers have struggled for years to find an industrial process to make spider silk, and have tried everything from making it in a lab dish to creating silk-secreting goats.
Now a group of researchers at the Technical University of Munich and the University of Bayreuth, Germany, has demonstrated a new method of production – an artificial version of the ducts spiders use to “spin” the silk. The artificial duct is a glass microfluidic chip shot through with tiny tubes. Inside the chip, two proteins found in silk from the European garden spider (_Araneus diadematus_) – known as ADF3 and ADF4 – flow along tiny tubes and are exposed to a phosphate salt solution that makes them aggregate into tiny spheres 1 to 5 micrometres across. A sudden jump in acidity and phosphate concentration then partially breaks open the spheres, allowing the proteins to latch together into chains. At this point, the flow speed increases and draws out the proteins into long silk fibres.
Posted by: The Editors
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