Spider Silks and their Artificial Counterparts

Spiders make various types of silks which have diverse properties and form archetypes for artificial materials. Among them, exatraordinary toughness and smart behavior such as supercontraction and water collection are particularly attractive. Unlike silkworm, spiders cannot be farmed due to their cannibalistic nature, which limits the utilization of spider silks in their natural form for real world applications, artificial spider silks are hot theme in scientific research and commercial attempts. Through the effort of most talented scientists and engineers in the world, theer have been progresses in these areas. On one hand, chemical approach to make biomimic polymers has been attempted, good results have been achieved in terms of toughness and structural similarities. On the othe hands, by utilizing the repeating modules of spider silks with different gene sequence motifs, novel and high performance materials have been designed. There are so far a range of recombinant spider silk proteins, namely, spidrions, being genetically produced by a variety of host organisms. By reviewing the recent progress in different approaches to make artificial spider silks and their scientific foudnations, this talk will present key issues in making biomimetic fibrous materials for practical applications including textiles and apparel.