England (Commonwealth Union) – Biological databases have played a significant role in medical biotechnology by identifying the genetic nature of many diseases. A new study hopes to apply the biological data on spiderwebs, which is said to be stronger than steel and more elastic than rubber. Spider silk has the potential of being an asset in both medical and industrial biotechnology.
The new worldwide study, which has catalogued web silk properties of approximately 1100 spiders, hopes to provide a base for the production of future biomaterials that reflect this wonder of nature.
Dr Sean Blamires, an evolutionary ecological biologist from University of New South Wales, School of Biological, Environmental and Earth Sciences, stated that the study, that appeared in the journal Science Advances, looked into the chemical structure, the genetics and the specific method that each spider spins their webs and noted these against the physical properties of the silk.
The researchers from across the world were from Asia, Oceania, Europe and the US spent five years gathering spiders from across the globe, monitoring them, extracting silk and sequencing their transcriptomes for the RNA molecules that are coded to produce silk. A large dataset was included in the current knowledge base which was previously restricted to 52 species of spiders in 18 families and 1098 new species from 76 families.
Dr Blamires said: “Up until now there was a pretty good literature set of how spider silk performs, and we’ve seen some good genetic analysis as well with some whole silk transcriptomes mapped out on three or four species.”
He further stated that the inability to generalise across spiders and investigate what actually causes specific properties poses a question of a connection between genes, protein structures and fibres. To this he explained that combinations of many species and samples gives the ability to carry out complex models with machine learning to assist in learning what’s occurring at every level.
