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The mechanical design of spider silks: from fibroin sequence to mechanical function
Abstract
Spiders produce a variety of silks, and the cloning of genes for silk fibroins reveals a clear link between protein sequence and structure–property relationships. The fibroins produced in the spider’s major ampullate (MA) gland, which forms the dragline and web frame, contain multiple repeats of motifs that include an 8–10 residue long poly-alanine block and a 24–35 residue long glycine-rich block. When fibroins are spun into fibres, the poly-alanine blocks form β-sheet crystals that crosslink the fibroins into a polymer network with great stiffness, strength and toughness. As illustrated by a comparison of MA silks from Araneus diadematus and Nephila clavipes, variation in fibroin sequence and properties between spider species provides the opportunity to investigate the design of these remarkable biomaterials.
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Cited by
Altman, G. H., Diaz, F., Jakuba, C., Calabro, T., Horan, R. L., Chen, J., Lu, H., Richmond, J., & Kaplan, D. L. (2003) · Biomaterials · doi:10.1016/s0142-9612(02)00353-8 · Cited by 3,458
Biological materials: Structure and mechanical properties
Meyers, M. A., Chen, P.-Y., Lin, A. Y.-M., & Seki, Y. (2008) · Progress in Materials Science · doi:10.1016/j.pmatsci.2007.05.002 · Cited by 2,573
New Opportunities for an Ancient Material
Omenetto, F. G., & Kaplan, D. L. (2010) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1188936 · Cited by 1,457
Structures, mechanical properties and applications of silk fibroin materials
Koh, L.-D., Cheng, Y., Teng, C.-P., Khin, Y.-W., Loh, X.-J., Tee, S.-Y., Low, M., Ye, E., Yu, H.-D., Zhang, Y.-W., et al. (2015) · Progress in Polymer Science · doi:10.1016/j.progpolymsci.2015.02.001 · Cited by 1,241
A review of natural fibers used in biocomposites: plant, animal and regenerated cellulose fibers
Ramamoorthy, S. K., Skrifvars, M., & Persson, A. (2015) · Polymer Reviews · doi:10.1080/15583724.2014.971124 · Cited by 801
Metadata
- Authors
- Gosline, J. M., Guerette, P. A., Ortlepp, C. S., & Savage, K. N.
- Venue
- Journal of Experimental Biology
- Publisher
- The Company of Biologists
- Published
- 1999-12-01
- Volume
- 202
- Issue
- 23
- Pages
- 3295-3303
- ISSN
- 0022-0949 (ISSN-L)
- 1477-9145
- OpenAlex
- W2161826643
- Cited by
- 1,165
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 10.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Gosline, J. M., Guerette, P. A., Ortlepp, C. S., & Savage, K. N. (1999). The mechanical design of spider silks: from fibroin sequence to mechanical function. Journal of Experimental Biology. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.202.23.3295
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
