The internal structure of spider silk

Scientists all over the world have studied spider silk because it is incredibly strong. It is also flexible. It’s tough. It’s a material stronger than steel with 10 times the extensibility of a material like Kevlar.

The researchers created a detailed model of spider silk, with seven layers of structural hierarchy that included the internal composition of microscopic silk fibers, known as nanofibrils. Nanofibrils are not well understood but have long been thought to play an important role in the structure of spider silk.

Using diverse spectroscopies, the researchers determined the concentration and orientation distributions of six distinct protein substructures that make up the silk nanofibrils.

They start with a protein and end up with something that’s stronger than steel. The techniques they developed to study the nanofibrils of spider silk could be applied to studying any protein. They could determine the collagen structure, for example, with a similar level of detail based on the techniques they developed in this work.

The findings could lead to developing of high-performance synthetic fibers inspired by spider silk.