One of the most unique ability of spiders is their ability to spin silk. The delicate spider silk has unique properties and by nature it is designed to intercept a fly or another flying insect. No matter how unbelievable it sounds, it is absolutely TRUE that spider silk from a spider web is 5 times stronger than steel! Considering its strength, it could find use in many industries starting from bulletproof vests for soldiers to surgical sutures for doctors.
However, producing and harvesting enough spider silk to make these types of products commercially available has posed a challenge. Which is why scientists have worked for a long time to produce similar engineered silk.
Why is spider silk so strong?
Scientists don’t know exactly how spiders form silk, but they do have a basic idea of the spinning process. Spiders have special glands that secrete silk proteins (made up of chains of amino acids), which are dissolved in a water-based solution. The spider pushes the liquid solution through long ducts, leading to microscopic spigots on the spider’s spinnerets. Spiders typically have two or three spinneret pairs, located at the rear of the abdomen.
A strand of spider silk which is 1000 times thinner than a human hair—is made up of thousand of nanostrands only 20 millionths of a millimeter in diameter. Just like a tiny cable, each silk fiber is entirely composed of parallel nanostrands, which they measured to be at least 1 micron long. That may not sound very lengthy, but on a nanoscale, it’s at least 50 times as long as these fibers are wide.
