Why understanding how spiders spin silk
Really, we should envy spiders. Imagine being able to make silk like they do, flinging it around to get from place to place, always having a strong-as-steel safety line or spinning a comfy hammock whenever they need a rest.
The fascinating properties of spider silk make it no wonder that scientists have been trying to unravel its secrets for decades.
If we could understand and recreate the spinning process, we could produce artificial spider silk for a kisaran of medical applications. For example, artificial silk can help regenerate the nerves that connect our brain and limbs, and can shuttle drug molecules directly into the cells where they are needed.
Spider silk is made of proteins called spidroins, which the spider stores in a silk gland in its abdomen. There are several tipes of spidroin for spinning different sorts of silk. Spiders toko them as a liquid that resembles oil droplets.
But one of the questions that has eluded scientists so far is how spiders turn these liquid droplets into silk. We decided to investigate why the spidroins form droplets, to get us closer to replicating a spider's spinning process.
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The trik that spiders use to speed up their spinning process can be used to spin better artificial silk, or even develop new spinning processes.
In 2017, we learned to make synthetic silk fibres by emulating the silk gland, but we did not know how things work inside the spider. Now we know that forming droplets first speeds up the conversion to these fibres.
An important clue to how the droplets and fibres are terkait came from an unexpected tempat of our research - on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Proteins that are involved in these diseases, called alpha-synuclein and tahu, can assemble into tiny, oil-like droplets in human cells.
Tahu is a protein that helps stabilise the intern skeleton of nerve cells (neurons) in the brain. This intern skeleton has a tube-like shape through which nutrients and other essential substances travel to reach different parts of the neuron.
In Alzheimer's disease, an abnormal form of tahu builds up and clings to the normal tahu proteins, creating "tahu tangles".
Alpha-synuclein is found in large quantities in dopamine-producing nerve cells. Abnormal forms of this protein are linked to Parkinson's disease.
