It can't rival Spider-Man yet, but a new micromachine that works like a spider's silk duct might finally lead the way to producing industrial quantities of high-quality artificial spider silk.
Spider silk is super-light, super-strong and elastic too. Existing human materials lack its useful combination of properties, and proposed uses span everything from bulletproof vests to optic fibres.
Researchers have struggled for years to find an industrial process to make spider silk, and have tried everything from making it in a lab dish to creating silk-secreting goats.
Now German researchers have demonstrated a new method of production – an artificial version of the ducts spiders use to "spin" the silk.
Spiders' silk ducts contain glands that process a gel of simple proteins into long fibres of protein. Different glands alter the chemistry of the gel in different ways, producing silk with different properties.
The artificial duct is a glass chip shot through with tiny tubes that tries to mimic those processes.
"The best thing is to reproduce nature, instead of cutting open spiders," says Andreas Bausch of the Technical University of Munich in Germany, who led the research with Thomas Scheibel of the University of Bayreuth, also Germany.
Bausch and Scheibel are the first to create a device that so accurately recreates the chemical and physical conditions of a real silk duct.
They are also the first to make fibres containing more than one silk protein. The chip uses two – known as ADF3 and ADF4 – found in silk from the European garden spider (Araneus diadematus).
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