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Spider Silk

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Spider Silk

 

the fluid excreted by the silk glands of certain arthropods (Arachneidae, Tetranychoidea, Pseudoscorpionidea, Embioptera), which may be drawn in the form of fine threads that rapidly harden in the air. Spider silk, which is similar to the silk of silkworms, consists mainly of very sturdy fibroin that is insoluble in water. The silk is not only resilient and strong but also sticky. It is used by the animal to construct snares, shelters, and egg cocoons.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
"Even a lot of the equipment I need to work on spider silks, I'm fabricating those tools myself," she says.
Spider silk is mainly composed of Glycine, Alanine and large amount of pyrrolidine.
Researchers recently discovered a property of spider silk called supercontraction, in which the slender fibres can suddenly shrink in response to changes in moisture.
Spider silk, already known as one of the strongest materials for its weight, turns out to have another unusual property that might lead to new kinds of artificial muscles or robotic actuators, researchers have found.
Under the pivotal agreement, Kraig will import, rear and begin testing its first batch of recombinant spider silk silkworm eggs in Vietnam.
But because a strand of spider silk is as much as six times stronger than steel and five times lighter, scientists have long searched for ways to replicate or mimic the production of this natural protein fiber.
It's too soon to see goat milk as an ingredient used in the fabric weaving, but the spider silk goat milk is now used to create needed medicines.
When wolf spider mothers lay eggs, they wrap them in spider silk to form an egg sac.
Thomas Scheibel, a professor of biomaterials at the University of Bayreuth's Department of Engineering, is working on a project to show how spider silk could be used to help restore cardiac muscle cells lost in a heart attack.
A promising approach: cardiac muscle tissue made of spider silk. Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Niirnberg (FAU) and their colleagues at the University of Bayreuth investigated whether artificial silk protein developed in the laboratory could be suitable to engineer cardiac tissue.
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