Learning from Spiders

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One of the most delicate things in nature is a spider's web.  Each gossamer strand is only one tenth the width of a human hair.  Yet spider silk is the strongest natural fibre known.  The giant web of a South Pacific spider is strong enough to be used as a fishing net. Weight for weight, spider silk is stronger than steel, and more elastic than nylon.

Spiders can produce unbelievable amounts of silk.  One investigator stripped six feet a minute from a tropical spider.  He stopped before the spider quit, after extracting some four hundred and fifty feet of silk.  But efforts to farm spiders always fail, mainly because they are territorial in nature.

For years scientists have attempted to synthesize spider silk for industrial and medical applications.  It would be ideal for making things like medical sutures, and high strength composites, and soft body armour.

A new approach now gives us reason to be optimistic about eventual success.  A Canadian company has coaxed mammalian cells into producing spinnable proteins by equipping them with spider silk genes.  After harvesting the proteins, scientists managed to spin them from a water based solution into fine silken threads.  The hope is that eventually large quantities of spider silk can be made by using genetically engineered goats which produce spider silk proteins in their milk.

So next time you see a spider web, remember, we still have a lot to learn from them.