Spider web stitches anyone?

At the RIKEN Centre for Sustainable Resource Science in Japan, a team of researchers have recreated one of nature’s greatest materials. Normally spider silk is created in a gland so the arachnid can shoot it out of its bum, but the team have created a device that spins a material almost identical to the stuff, no anus required!

The artificial arse recreates the “complex molecular structure” of spider silk by creating the chemical reactions in the gland. Not only is this an impressive feat, but it could also change a number of industries and make them more eco-friendly.

These glistening threads are as strong as steel (or at least steel wire as thin as a cobweb), while being way more lightweight. They’re also biodegradable and biocompatible, making them useful in medical settings. As harvesting the real stuff large-scale has never been possible (or fortunately if you don’t like that mental image), the researchers hope that their artificial method can be scaled up. So in a few years, your doctor could be giving you stitches made of cobwebs, but thankfully not one from a real spider!

Spider silk is a complex biopolymer fibre, made from large proteins lined up in just the right way. Trying to recreate this has stumped scientists for years, until the RIKEN team tried taking “a biomimicry approach”. Lead researcher Keiji Numata explains “we attempted to mimic natural spider silk production using microfluidics, which involves the flow and manipulation of small amounts of fluids through narrow channels.”

Using a precision engineered box filled with tiny channels, the device draws through the basic ingredients of silk, then exposes it to just the right conditions to turn it into impossibly strong and thin threads. Once all parts of the system had been perfectly adjusted, senior scientist Ali Malay described it as “surprising how robust” it turned out to be.

If widespread, the synthetic silk could reduce the environmental damage currently caused by the textile industry, and be used in artificial ligaments, stitches and other medical procedures. Numata hopes to “scale-up our fibre-production methodology” going forward so that the real-life web-shooter can reach all its potential applications.

by Louis Davies @louis.on.air

Source:

Chen, J., Tsuchida, A., Malay, A.D. et al. Replicating shear-mediated self-assembly of spider silk through microfluidics. Nat Commun 15, 527 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-44733-1