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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.
The mussel Pinna nobilis creates silk to bond itself to rocks. It is used to make sea silk. Spiders make spider silk for various purposes such as weaving their webs, protecting their eggs or as a safety line. The amphipod Peramphithoe femorata uses silk to make a nest out of kelp blades. Another amphipod, Crassicorophium bonellii, use silk to ...
Sericulture, or silk farming, is the cultivation of silkworms to produce silk. Although there are several commercial species of silkworms, the caterpillar of the domestic silkmoth is the most widely used and intensively studied silkworm.
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 of proteins. Dragline silk is mainly formed by spidroin proteins. It is a type of major ampullate silk and is produced in the major ampullate gland.
Silk taken from various species has been used since ancient times, either in its natural state or after some form of preparation. Spider webs were used as a wound dressing in ancient Greece and Rome, [2] and as a base for painting from the 16th century. [3] Caterpillar nests were used to make containers and fabric in the Aztec Empire. [1] [4]
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]
Silkhenge structures are a means of spider reproduction used by one or more currently-unknown species of spider. It typically consists of a central " spire " constructed of spider silk , containing one to two eggs, surrounded by a sort of fence of silk in a circle.
The conventional process of sericulture kills the silkworm in the pupal stage. [2] The domestic silk moth was domesticated from the wild silk moth Bombyx mandarina, which has a range from northern India to northern China, Korea, Japan, and the far eastern regions of Russia. The domestic silk moth derives from Chinese rather than Japanese or ...