The seven spider silks - a unique source for biomimetic material production

Spiders have evolved over more than 400 million years and today can spin up to seven different types of silks, with different properties and uses, from specialized glands. Five of these silk types are spun into fibers that have diverse mechanical properties. These include the toughest thread known to man (major ampullate silk) but also fibers that are highly extensible (stretchable to >200%, flagelliform silk) and fibers that are resistant to water (minor ampullate silk).

In addition to these five fiber types, the spider can also produce two types of glue (pyriform and aggregate silk).

The fibers and adhesives are made from renewable raw materials and polymerize in microseconds in a process that is entirely water-based. This makes spider silk very exciting to study for several reasons. We will increase our understanding of how the specialized glands of the spider work and how they differ; what components are required to spin a thread? What conditions in the glands are important for storage and spinning? Which proteins give which mechanical properties? We will also produce artificial spider silk fibers with protein compositions corresponding to the natural ones, thereby enabling the production of fibers with widely different mechanical properties and applications.

In a subproject, we use machine learning to create a model that can help us understand how the different components in fibers from different species affect the mechanical properties of the spider silk fiber. The goal is to also use this to optimize the composition and mechanical properties of the artificial silk fibers we produce.