Scalable Spider-Silk-Like Supertough Fibers With Potential In Defense

Spiders silks have extraordinary strength and toughness simultaneously, thus has become dreamed materials by scientists and industries. Although there have been tremendous attempts to prepare fibers from genetically manufacture spider silk proteins, however, it has been still a huge challenge to artificially make a material with such high performance, do not mentioning the scaling-up because of extremely low productivity and high cost. Here, a facile spider-silk-mimicking strategy is firstly reported for preparing a scalable supertough fiber from chemical synthesis route. Supertoughness (~387 MJ m-3) is achieved by introducing β-sheet crystals and α-helical peptides simultaneously in a pseudoprotein polymer. The toughness of this fiber is more than twice the reported value of a normal spider dragline silk, and comparable with the toughest spider silk, aciniform silk of Argiope trifasciata.