Uploaded May 2017 | Updated September 2026, 4 hours ago
Narration - Alex Greif
Audio Editing - Marie Phillips
Video Editing - Wesley Daugherty and Nick Mohammad
Research, Storyboarding, and Directing - All team members listed above
Since ancient times it has been known that putting cobwebs on bleeding wounds would help staunch the flow of blood and heal the wound. Obviously our forebears were onto something, since it’s been found that spider silk is incredibly compatible with human biology. This compatibility lead to an interest in spider silk and influenced scientists to discover more about it. Spider silk, along with with its biomedical uses, has incredible tensile strength and elasticity on top of having a low density. One of the main drivers behind the strength of spider silk is its complex protein structure, which combines solid blocks of alanine crystal intertwined with glycine string structures to produce an incredibly resilient material. However, the processing of spider silk to produce the particular intertwining of proteins is crucial to maximizing strength. The problem is that so far spider silk has been hard to mass produce.
Unlike sheep or bees, spiders are solitary and extremely territorial, so their silk is prohibitively difficult to harvest en masse. This leads to a need for a synthetic process by which the silk can be formed. Until recently, a major challenge in the production of synthetic spider silk was the process of replicating silk ducts, which naturally regulate the silk’s structural and chemical properties. A new approach to processing synthetic spider silk involves selectively choosing proteins from different species of spiders and combining them in order to maximize the solubility of the hybrid protein. This allows the synthetic silk to be spun in conditions similar to a spider’s silk duct, which in turn creates a synthetic silk that is more similar to real spider silk than has previously been produced.
The ability to mass-produce synthetic spider silk has applications in many different fields, including biomedical engineering and the textile industry. However, although these industries continue to function without spider silk, the efficiency and efficacy of the products within these industries could be improved with synthetic spider silk. With the breakthroughs in production of synthetic spider silk these applications can be explored in a way not possible in the past.
Research Sources:
mhhe.com/biosci/genbio/life/articles/article1.mhtml
phys.org/news/2017-01-doctors-scientists-spider-silk-lab.html
http://web.mit.edu/course/3/3.064/www/slides/Ko_spider_silk.pdf
kraiglabs.com/spider-silk
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0114_050114_tv_spider_2.html
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0061100
Simmons, Alexandra H., et al. “Molecular Orientation and Two-Component Nature of the Crystalline Fraction of Spider Dragline Silk.” Science, vol. 271, no. 5245, 1996, pp. 84–87., jstor.org/stable/2890379.
nature.com/nchembio/journal/v13/n3/full/nchembio.2269.html
phys.org/news/2010-05-scientists-goats-spider-silk.html
science20.com/news_articles/how_spiders_spin_silk_the_biology-142028
sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/how-spin-synthetic-spider-silk
Foelix, R. F. (1982). Biology of Spiders. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Image/Video Sources:
docs.google.com/document/d/1XT6F1vxG0OFpYTphN2iIuU0Z98UrEe22tjAeelu8GPg/edit?usp=sharing
The images and videos used in this video are the intellectual property of their respective creators.
Narration - Alex Greif
Audio Editing - Marie Phillips
Video Editing - Wesley Daugherty and Nick Mohammad
Research, Storyboarding, and Directing - All team members listed above
Since ancient times it has been known that putting cobwebs on bleeding wounds would help staunch the flow of blood and heal the wound. Obviously our forebears were onto something, since it’s been found that spider silk is incredibly compatible with human biology. This compatibility lead to an interest in spider silk and influenced scientists to discover more about it. Spider silk, along with with its biomedical uses, has incredible tensile strength and elasticity on top of having a low density. One of the main drivers behind the strength of spider silk is its complex protein structure, which combines solid blocks of alanine crystal intertwined with glycine string structures to produce an incredibly resilient material. However, the processing of spider silk to produce the particular intertwining of proteins is crucial to maximizing strength. The problem is that so far spider silk has been hard to mass produce.
Unlike sheep or bees, spiders are solitary and extremely territorial, so their silk is prohibitively difficult to harvest en masse. This leads to a need for a synthetic process by which the silk can be formed. Until recently, a major challenge in the production of synthetic spider silk was the process of replicating silk ducts, which naturally regulate the silk’s structural and chemical properties. A new approach to processing synthetic spider silk involves selectively choosing proteins from different species of spiders and combining them in order to maximize the solubility of the hybrid protein. This allows the synthetic silk to be spun in conditions similar to a spider’s silk duct, which in turn creates a synthetic silk that is more similar to real spider silk than has previously been produced.
The ability to mass-produce synthetic spider silk has applications in many different fields, including biomedical engineering and the textile industry. However, although these industries continue to function without spider silk, the efficiency and efficacy of the products within these industries could be improved with synthetic spider silk. With the breakthroughs in production of synthetic spider silk these applications can be explored in a way not possible in the past.
Research Sources:
mhhe.com/biosci/genbio/life/articles/article1.mhtml
phys.org/news/2017-01-doctors-scientists-spider-silk-lab.html
http://web.mit.edu/course/3/3.064/www/slides/Ko_spider_silk.pdf
kraiglabs.com/spider-silk
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0114_050114_tv_spider_2.html
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0061100
Simmons, Alexandra H., et al. “Molecular Orientation and Two-Component Nature of the Crystalline Fraction of Spider Dragline Silk.” Science, vol. 271, no. 5245, 1996, pp. 84–87., jstor.org/stable/2890379.
nature.com/nchembio/journal/v13/n3/full/nchembio.2269.html
phys.org/news/2010-05-scientists-goats-spider-silk.html
science20.com/news_articles/how_spiders_spin_silk_the_biology-142028
sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/how-spin-synthetic-spider-silk
Foelix, R. F. (1982). Biology of Spiders. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Image/Video Sources:
docs.google.com/document/d/1XT6F1vxG0OFpYTphN2iIuU0Z98UrEe22tjAeelu8GPg/edit?usp=sharing
The images and videos used in this video are the intellectual property of their respective creators.
