Extraordinary Mechanical Properties of Composite Silk Through Hereditable Transgenic Silkworm Expressing Recombinant Major Ampullate Spidroin

• Published in: Scientific reports 2018-10, Vol.8 (1), p.15956-14, Article 15956
• Main Authors: You, Zhengying, Ye, Xiaogang, Ye, Lupeng, Qian, Qiujie, Wu, Meiyu, Song, Jia, Che, Jiaqian, Zhong, Boxiong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 101/28; 14; 14/1; 38; 38/1; 38/44; 38/77; 42; 42/109; 42/44; 631/337; 631/61; Amino acid sequence; Animals; Animals, Genetically Modified; Biocompatibility; Biodegradability; Biodegradation; Black Widow Spider - genetics; Bombyx - genetics; Bombyx - metabolism; Chromosomes, Artificial, Bacterial; Exons - genetics; Fibers; Fibroins - chemistry; Fibroins - genetics; Genes, Insect; Genes, Synthetic; Genetic Vectors; Genotype; Humanities and Social Sciences; Latrodectus hesperus; MASP-1 protein; MASP-2 protein; Mechanical properties; Microscopy, Electron, Scanning; multidisciplinary; Protein structure; Proteins; Recombinant Proteins - biosynthesis; Recombinant Proteins - chemistry; Repetitive Sequences, Amino Acid; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Silk; Silk - chemistry; Silk - ultrastructure; Spiders; Stress, Mechanical; Tensile Strength
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-34150-y

Spider dragline silk is a remarkable material that shows excellent mechanical properties, diverse applications, biocompatibility and biodegradability. Transgenic silkworm technology was used to obtain four types of chimeric silkworm/spider (termed composite) silk fibres, including different lengths of recombinant Major ampullate Spidroin1 (re-MaSp1) or recombinant Major ampullate Spidroin2 (re-MaSp2) from the black widow spider, Latrodectus hesperus . The results showed that the overall mechanical properties of composite silk fibres improved as the re-MaSp1 chain length increased, and there were significant linear relationships between the mechanical properties and the re-MaSp1 chain length (p