Spider Silk: Structure, Creation & Application

The charm of the silk fabric has tempted human race since thousands for years. The variety and range of color and spectacular texture has made this fabric most friendly to all. It is manufactured both naturally and artificially. There are four types of natural silk which are available on the market these days:

1. Tasar

2. Mulberry

3. Muga

4. Eri

Since silk has always been in high demand, the four natural silk is not easy to find. The pressure has been built now and silk is being created artificially.  The significant research that is done these days is to find a source which produces natural silk. So, the most vicious and cannibalistic creature was found which has the capability to create good silk fiber.

Spider silk is a fiber, which is extracted from spiders. It is strong fiber, even its tensile strength is compared to the steel. The silk that spiders produce is five to six times stronger than high-grade steel by weight. The tensile strength of steel is 1.65 Gpa, whereas spider silk tensile strength is 1.3 Gpa. Spiders may even digest their silk if there is a scarcity of food. Researchers have developed certain methods to develop silk from them by force. As easy as it sounds, extracting silk from the spider is much more difficult compared to Silkworms.

 

Spider silk's Structure

 

Spider silk is more durable and elastic than the strongest man-made fiber, Kevlar, which is used to fill bulletproof vests. It has a unique fiber, which has crystalline sectors with amorphous linkage.

Spider silk is very flexible and can be stretched up to 30-40 percent of its original length with no breakage problems. This results in a high malleability. Spider Silk is made of protein which consists of much complex molecular structures. With cannibalistic and territorial nature, Spider can't be farmed as they can also attack and eat each other. To create one square yard cloth 400 spiders are put on the job.

When exposed to open air, the fiber gets harder and creates a problem to work with. Because of the repetitive symptoms of the DNA encoding, it is difficult to recognize its sequence. Only from 14 species, the protein has been decoded yet.

 

Spider Silk Creation

 

The silk glands release the world unique fiber. Different spider species have different glands for their own reason like web-creation, housing, capturing the prey and defense. The gland which creates silk and helps them with all these creations are known as the spinneret. The key ingredients for this silk fiber are thole and tyro sine. After the fiber is created, the ampule works as a storage box. Here, spinning duct sweeps-off water from the fiber and small channels also help in this process. Liquid separation is conducted at the verge the distal limb of the duct and further passes through the valve. The valve is anticipated to help in fixing broken fibers again, playing more in the path of a helical pump.

 

Artificial spider silk

 

Since a large number of spiders are required to create an enormous quantity of silk, it is very hard to acquire for industrial demands. Researchers have taken steps in extracting the spider silk gene along with required options to manufacture the needed quantity of spider silk. An experiment was conducted, Goats were injected the gene of spiders and the milk produced was having a rich source of protein. The trails failed due to the reason that the protein extracted after spinning it from the milk was not equivalent to that of the natural spider silk.

 

Spider Silk Applications

 

Recent research in the spider silk includes its prospective implementation as highly strong and versatile thing. The interest in producing the spider silk is mostly due to a blend both, its mechanical properties and the non-polluting option since the manufacturing of latest man-made fibers like DuPont's Kevlar, are made from petrochemical processing that results in massive environmental abuse. Additionally, spider silk is fully ecological.

 

Conclusion

 

The Spider Silk has raised an open provocation to scientist, engineer, spinner and weavers to manage its expansion and to get introduced to essential skills of spider in making the silk thread.

Kriag Labs have the specialized team which is working hard to distribute all information on spider silk. We have advanced a synergistic research and development effort with The University of Notre Dame. All our hard work has resulted in a number of exciting spider silk technological breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs include the development of numerous strains of transgenic silkworm which produce genetically engineered spider silk. Some of our work is reviewed and described in the prestigious peer-reviewed science journal PNAS (the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences). To learn more about our research.