Wednesday, December 08, 2010

spider silk

Research into the amazing material properties and potential uses of spider silk is a field I have followed for many years. My latest piece on this features the use of methods from polymer science (including rheology and theoretical models) for a better understanding of what makes spider silk special and why it isn't so easy to recreate the material even given the protein sequences. The piece also reports recent progress in structural biology of silk and attempts to reconstitute it.

It appears in the December issue of Chemistry World:
The spider's apprentices
[restricted access]

There is also a German article about this in the December issue of Nachrichten aus der Chemie - details to follow when I do my roundup of German pieces for this month.

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