Nature has many examples of self-assembly, and bioengineers are interested in copying or manipulating these systems to create useful new materials or devices. Amyloid proteins, for example, can self-assemble into the tangled ...
Bio & Medicine
Jan 26, 2015
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Pound for pound, spider silk is one of the strongest materials known: Research by MIT's Markus Buehler has helped explain that this strength arises from silk's unusual hierarchical arrangement of protein building blocks.
Materials Science
Nov 28, 2012
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(PhysOrg.com) -- The aptly named silk worms long appeared to have the monopoly on insect silk production, but now scientists are revealing that the world of insect silks is highly complex.
Biotechnology
Sep 10, 2009
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In a study published in the journal MedComm, researchers have developed an efficient protein delivery carrier based on spider silk proteins (spidroins), derived from Araneus ventricosus minor ampullate silk protein (MiSp). ...
Bio & Medicine
Jun 20, 2024
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Cancer is simultaneously one of the most common and devastating diseases in our society. So working out new ways to treat it is an enduring scientific challenge.
Biochemistry
Mar 17, 2022
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Why are the lightweight silk threads of web spiders tougher than most other materials? Scientists from the Universities of Würzburg and Mainz teamed up to find answers to this question. They were able to show that the natural ...
Biochemistry
Sep 26, 2019
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Achieving strength and extensibility at the same time has so far been a great challenge in material engineering: increasing strength has meant losing extensibility and vice versa. Now Aalto University and VTT researchers ...
Materials Science
Sep 16, 2019
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Spider silk is among the strongest and toughest materials in the natural world, as strong as some steel alloys with a toughness even greater than bulletproof Kevlar. Spider silk's unmatched combination of strength and toughness ...
Biotechnology
Aug 21, 2018
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While stuck in a hotel room I got sucked into watching the 2002 Spiderman movie. And it struck me that Peter Parker must have an enormously high-protein diet to generate all that spider silk he goes through. So being the ...
Materials Science
Jan 29, 2015
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At seven times the toughness of Kevlar, a silk produced by the Caerostris darwini spider of Madagascar is more robust than any other material—synthetic or natural. Most spider silks are about two times tougher than Kevlar, ...
Materials Science
May 13, 2013
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