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Spider silk structure: crystalline beta-sheets separated by amorphous linkages. Silks have a hierarchical structure. The primary structure is the amino acid sequence of its proteins (), mainly consisting of highly repetitive glycine and alanine blocks, [4] [5] which is why silks are often referred to as a block co-polymer.
Spider web strands have been used for crosshairs or reticles in telescopes. [28] Development of technologies to mass-produce spider silk has led to the manufacturing of prototype military protection, wound dressings and other medical devices, and consumer goods. [29] [30] [31] Spider webs can be used as a single step catalyst to make ...
Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. (www.KraigLabs.com), a reporting biotechnology company is the leading developer of genetically engineered spider silk-based fiber technologies. The Company has achieved a series of scientific breakthroughs in the area of spider silk technology with implications for the global textile industry.
Kim Kraig Thompson, a retired lawyer, invented the protein expression platform in 2002, which would become the basis for Kraig Lab's work with spider silk. [3] He founded Kraig Biocraft Laboratories in April 2006 to develop and commercialize spider silks and other high-performance polymers gene and sequences using platform technology in combination with genetic engineering concepts.
The spider silk has a greater tensile strength than steel, and the material is even strong enough to stop a bullet. In terms of everyday usage, spider silk could be a huge game changer when it ...
The average toughness of the fibres is 350 MJ/m 3, and some are up to 520 MJ/m 3, making the silk twice as tough as any other spider silk known. [8] The web of Darwin's bark spider is remarkable in that it is not only the longest spanning web ever observed, but is the largest orb web ever seen, at an area of up to 2.8 square metres (30 sq ft). [2]
Since spider silk has a variety of potential uses, including in fabrics and biomedical technologies, the sequence motifs for genes coding for this silk in the species have been studied to examine the potential for artificial production. In the study by Lee et al., clones of the genes for this silk were produced and injected into insect cells to ...
This complex silk machinery enables spiders to use task-specific silks (e.g., for web assembly, egg-case construction, prey wrapping, etc.). [10] The different types of silk (major ampullate silk, minor ampullate silk, flagelliform silk, aciniform silk, tubiliform silk, pyriform silk, and aggregate silk) [ 11 ] are composed of different types ...