Spider silk is a promising biomaterial with impressive performance. However, some spider silks also 'supercontract' when exposed to water, shrinking by up to ∼50% in length. Supercontraction may provide a critical mechanism to tailor silk properties, both for future synthetic silk production and by the spiders themselves. Several hypotheses are proposed for the mechanism and function of superco...

Among a myriad of spider web geometries, the orb web presents a fascinating, exquisite example in architecture and evolution. Its structural component, the silk protein, is an exemplary natural material because its superior properties stem intrinsically from the synergistic cooperativity of hierarchically-organized components, rather than from the particular properties of the building blocks th...

Spider silk is strong and extensible but still biodegradable and well tolerated when implanted, making it the ultimate biomaterial. Shortcomings that arise in replicating spider silk are due to the use of recombinant spider silk proteins (spidroins) that lack native domains, the use of denaturing conditions under purification and spinning and the fact that the understanding of how spiders contr...

Spiders' cobwebs ensnare both walking and flying prey. While the scaffolding silk can entangle flying insects, gumfoot silk threads pull walking prey off the ground and into the web. Therefore, scaffolding silk needs to withstand the impact of the prey, whereas gumfoot silk needs to easily detach from the substrate when contacted by prey. Here we show that spiders accomplish these divergent dem...

The evolutionary diversification of spiders is attributed to spectacular innovations in silk. Spiders are unique in synthesizing many different kinds of silk, and using silk for a variety of ecological functions throughout their lives, particularly to make prey-catching webs. Here, we construct a broad higher-level phylogeny of spiders combining molecular data with traditional morphological and...

In spite of all the efforts on deciphering such spinning process of spiders, the underlying mechanism currently is yet to be fully revealed. In this research, we designed a novel approach to quantitatively estimate the overall concentration change of spider silk along the progression of liquid-to-solid silk transition from the gland silk. As a prior characterization, we first studied the influe...

Many kinds of membrane have been used for the guided bone regeneration (GBR) technique. However, most membranes do not fulfill all requirements for the ideal membrane for the GBR technique. Among them, collagen membrane has been most widely used. However, its high price and weak tensile strength in wet condition are limitations for wide clinical application. Synthetic polymers have also been us...

We present a silk biomaterial platform with highly tunable mechanical and degradation properties for engineering and regeneration of soft tissues such as, skin, adipose, and neural tissue, with elasticity properties in the kilopascal range. Lyophilized silk sponges were prepared under different process conditions and the effect of silk molecular weight, concentration and crystallinity on 3D sca...

Bombyx mori (silkworm) silk proteins have been utilized as unique biomaterials for various medical applications. To develop a novel affinity silk material, we generated a transgenic silkworm that spins silk protein containing the fibroin L-chain linked with the single-chain variable fragment (scFv) as a fusion protein. Previously, the scFv-conjugated "affinity" silk powder specifically immunopr...

Arthropods face several key challenges in processing concentrated feedstocks of proteins (silk dope) into solid, semi-crystalline silk fibres. Strikingly, independently evolved lineages of silk-producing organisms have converged on the use of liquid crystal intermediates (mesophases) to reduce the viscosity of silk dope and assist the formation of supramolecular structure. However, the exact na...