Spider Silk: The Challenging Option

The charm of fabric made of silk has always allured humankind since many years. The wide range of colors dazed and excellent texture has favored this fabric as one of the most amicable fabrics of all. Silk is manufactured both artificially and manually. There are four types of silk available namely mulberry, taser, eri, and muga. However, the very high demand of silk for silk has led to a social pressure of searching for more options. The increasing demand for silk is not fulfilled by these four naturally available silk. So, the significant question here comes- Is there any difference source available for natural silk and the answer is yes. Spider Silk. It is very true that the ignored insect and the irritating can really produce a good fiber silk.

Spider silk is a natural fiber which is created from the spider. The tensile strength of spider silk has been compared to the silk. The tensile strength of spider silk is approximately 1.3gpa whereas for the stell is 1.65gpa, which is almost 5 times more.

Spider Silk structure

In a unique fiber, a number of crystalline sectors along with amorphous linkages are present there and this crystal sector is put together. Spider silk is so flexible that it can be stretched to 40% extra of its original length without creating any problem which results in the high flexibility. Spider silk's liquid crystalline spinning is just same as aromatic nylon.

Spider silk is produced with mixed molecules of protein. The spider cannot be grown such as silkworms because they are natives. Due to which they also eat each other. The silk removed is very fine and to make one square yard cloth almost 400 spiders are required. If the fiber is left in an open-air, it gets hard and it becomes problematic to work. It also becomes difficult to understand its sequence due to monotonous symptoms of DNA encoding. From only 14 species proteins has been decoded.

Spider Silk Origin

Spider species has different glands which result in their own specialty such as housing, capturing prey and defense, web-creation. Spinneret is the visible part of the gland. The internal part of the gland is filled with tyrosine and thiol and the key ingredient in silk fiber. Ampulla plays the role of storage box after the creation of fibers.

Artificial Spider silk

It is not possible to fulfill the need of industrial by creating spider silk in huge quantity as it is easy to manage a large number of spiders. Nowadays, many industries had taken the step for the formation of spider silk from other option rather than using spider silk gene, to complete the required quantity of spider silk. "Nexia" a Canadian biotechnical company was successful in the year 2000, to make spider silk protein through goat.

Kraigs Lab continuous to provide extensive research in the development and effort on Spider Silk. The work has been reviewed by prestigious science journal PNAS. For more information visit http://www.kraiglabs.com.