Stronger than steel...
able to stop a speeding bullet...
It’s a bird, it’s a plane!
Its … Spiderman?
Hello Everybody, Crystal here for DNews.
Those of us that are not entomologists probably don’t have any love lost for spiders unless
their superpowers are helping us fight or escape from bad guys.
Now, thanks to actual (not comicbook) science, spider silk could help us do just that.
The silken material spiders use to build their creepy webs is a complex form of protein fiber
that does more than just catch flies.
Using specialized glands spiders produce their silk from a protein rich liquid that is dried
into solid filaments by an external portion of these glands called spinnerets.
This process is dynamic and spiders can produce different “types” of silk depending on
whether they are weaving a web, creating an egg sac, or planning a ballooning trip to
another location.
Whatever the purpose, the supermaterial spiders produce is strong, flexible, and lightweight.
It can also stretch to many times its original length, contracts when it is exposed to water,
has a greater tensile strength than steel, and produces a mesh strong enough to stop
a bullet.
All this makes spider silk an attractive material for use in things meant to reduce the consequences
of physical impact like body armor, vehicle airbags, and football helmets.
But spider silk has some super biological applications too.
Its acidic nature gives it antimicrobial properties and it’s also nonantigenic, meaning it does
not trigger an immune response in the human body.
This makes it an ideal candidate for use in medical engineering.
In fact, prototypes of spider silk enhanced synthetic tendons, cartilage and ligaments,
as well as surgical sutures and sealants already exist!
So why can’t we go out and buy a bolt of the stuff?
Well, until recently it was really hard to make a lot of it.
Research into commercial production of spider silk has been ongoing for a few decades, but
while the silk worms that produce fibers for commercial silk can be easily raised for harvest,
spiders are not so cooperative.
Imagine trying to raise thousands of territorial and predatory arachnids.
Even if you could keep them from fighting and eating each other you’d still have to
anesthetize them and hand milk them for their silk …. no thank you.
Scientists have tried all kinds of crazy things in an effort to produce spider silk on a commercial
scale, but my favorite one involves goats.
I mean, obviously...
Professor Randy Lewis at the University of Utah, has bred genetically modified goats
to contain genes from orb-web weaving spiders.
These goats produce spider silk proteins in their milk that can be harvested like traditional
whey.
Other organisms that have been modified in the hopes of producing enough protein for
commercial viability are silkworms, bacteria, and yeast.
Now, each of these approaches has its problems, but they are not insurmountable, so we may
see spider silk enhanced products in the market sooner than we think.
In keeping with the theme of spider appreciation, check out this video from Julia, about some
of the strangest spiders in existence