BACKGROUND Several materials have been used for tissue engineering purposes, since the ideal matrix depends on the desired tissue. Silk biomaterials have come to focus due to their great mechanical properties. As untreated silkworm silk has been found to be quite immunogenic, an alternative could be spider silk. Not only does it own unique mechanical properties, its biocompatibility has been sh...

The use of silk-based materials for medical and biotechnological applications has been investigated for many years, with particular progress the last fifteen years. Extensive research has been conducted on silk derived from the silkworm Bombyx mori, but lately the evolvement in recombinant production has made mimics of spider silk proteins increasingly available. Revealed characteristics of sil...

The cotton leaf roller, Sylepta derogata, is a silk-producing insect pest. While young larvae feed on the underside of leaves, the older ones roll cotton leaves and feed on the leaf edges, which defoliates cotton plants. The larvae produce silk to stabilize the rolled leaf and to balloon from used to new leaves. Despite the significance of silk in the biology of pest insect species, there is vi...

Many spiders depend upon webs to capture prey. Web function results from architecture and mechanical performance of the silk. We hypothesized that the common house spider, Achaearanea tepidariorum, would alter the mechanical performance of its cobweb in response to different prey by varying the structural and material properties of its silk. We fed spiders either large, high kinetic energy cric...

Among a myriad of spider web geometries, the orb web presents a fascinating, exquisite example in architecture and evolution. Orb webs can be divided into two categories according to the capture silk used in construction: cribellate orb webs (composed of pseudoflagelliform silk) coated with dry cribellate threads and ecribellate orb webs (composed of flagelliform silk fibres) coated by adhesive...

Silk has a robust clinical track record and is emerging as a promising biopolymer for drug delivery, including its use as nanomedicine. However, silk-based nanomedicines still require further refinements for full exploitation of their potential; the application of "stealth" design principals is especially necessary to support their evolution. The aim of this study was to develop and examine the...

This is the first report on dual synthesis of poly[(R)-3-hydroxybutyric acid] (PHB) and protein polymer by recombinant microorganisms for use in the fabrication of a biofunctional PHB-based material hybridized with functional proteins. PHB and recombinant silk protein, a model protein developed in this study, were synthesized by a recombinant Escherichia coli system, and then films of PHB hybri...

Silks are renowned for being lightweight materials with impressive mechanical properties. Though moth and spider silks have received the most study, silk production has evolved in many other arthropods. One insect group that has been little investigated is Embioptera (webspinners). Embiopterans produce silk from unique tarsal spinning structures during all life stages. We characterize the molec...

Thalassaemias and haemoglobinopathies are the most common genetic disease and impose a major burden on the population of India due to its high degree of morbidity and moderate to severe anaemia among different segments of the society. Amongst the population of 1000 million at the new millennium (2000) forty-five million carriers and fifteen thousand infants with major haemoglobinopathies have b...