Spider silk made by photosynthetic bacteria

Spiders produce amazingly strong and lightweight threads called draglines that are made from silk proteins. Although they can be used to manufacture a number of useful materials, getting enough of the protein is difficult ...

Spider silk: A malleable protein provides reinforcement

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 ...

A combination of wood fibres and spider silk could rival plastic

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 ...

New protein found in strongest spider web material

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and Slovenia has found a previously unknown protein in the strongest known spider web material. In their paper published in the journal Communications ...

Molecular insights into spider silk

Spider silk is one of the toughest fibres in nature and has astounding properties. Scientists from the University of Würzburg discovered new molecular details of self-assembly of a spider silk fibre protein.

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