The number of times I have walked into a spider web is pretty comical. At first, I saw them as a nuisance during my forest ...

This type of silk, which is used to construct the rim and spokes of a web, has a similar tensile strength to steel of approximately 1.5 GPa but a much lower density of 1.3 g/cm 3. And unlike steel, ...

The resulting model mapped silk protein differences between silkworms and spiders. Luckily, both species spin fibers out of similar protein structures—called polyamide fibers—though each is based on ...

“We have developed a completely new method for creating a three-dimensional gel from spider silk that can be designed to deliver different functional proteins,” says Anna Rising, DVM, PhD ...

Researchers have discovered that spider silk proteins can be fused to biologically active proteins and be converted into a gel at body temperature. One of the goals is to develop an injectable ...

In testing, they found that the silk they’d just created—identical to spider dragline silk in appearance—was 70 percent stronger. It was also more than twice as strong as a silkworm’s ...

Discover how CRISPR-Cas9 technology is revolutionizing spider silk production with red fluorescent fibers and advancing genetic research.

Spider silk is biodegradable and produces only a very small immune response in animal models. It’s also scalable. A single harvest from an orb weaving spider can yield around 33 ft ...

Spider silk is a remarkable natural material that has captured the imagination of a group of scientists who are currently exploring its untapped potential in medical and materials science. Its high ...