AN ANTHOLOGY OF THOUGHT & EMOTION... Un'antologia di pensieri & emozioni
הידע של אלוהים לא יכול להיות מושגת על ידי המבקשים אותו, אבל רק אלה המבקשים יכול למצוא אותו

USING THE WEB

The Amazing Spider Silk
The natural fiber that can help regenerate bones. Scientists have found amazing uses for the humble spider silk, but it's really hard to procure.

Did you know spider webs serve another purpose other than being the home of your friendly, neighborhood spider? Spider webs make for an excellent natural treatment for healing cuts and scrapes! This is a long-forgotten natural remedy for sealing open wounds and accelerating healing. Even modern science has embraced spider web as a great treatment for scrapes and wounds.
Spider webs are incredibly strong. It’s made from silk produced from the body proteins of the spider, turning it into silk through spinnerets. The spinnerets are located on a spider’s abdomen. Each spider has three or four spinnerets. Inside the spinnerets are numerous spigots connected to a single silk gland.

The spider silk starts out in liquid form. As the material is being drawn out of the spider’s body, it begins to harden. This movement literally changes the structural components of the protein.

The spider silk could be stronger than a thread of steel in equal thickness yet it’s extremely flexible; so flexible that a spider can spin different patterns without breaking the material. And this is why, surprisingly, it serves a lot of purpose!

How Spider Webs Work to Heal Wounds

Using cobwebs or spider webs has been done since ancient times when Greeks and Romans treated wounded soldiers with it to stop bleeding. Although Greeks and Romans know very little about viral and bacterial infections, through trial and error, they discovered the surprising benefits of spider webs. Soldiers would even use a combination of honey and vinegar to clean deep wounds and then cover the whole thing with balled-up spider webs.

An open wound treated with a cluster of spider web or cobwebs will dry out faster. Cobwebs have antifungal and antiseptic properties that keep bacteria away, minimizing the chances of an infection. It works so well that cobwebs efficiently stop bleeding. What’s more, spider webs are high in vitamin K, a vitamin that triggers blood clotting! As long as the web is clean, it will not cause any infection or aggravate the wound’s condition at all.

How to Make Your Own Bandage Made from Spider Web
WARNING: Do not attempt to make your own spider web bandage when you live in a place full of poisonous spiders.

It’s easy to make your own bandage. First, you have to look for a clean spider web — you want a freshly spun web or one that does not have insect corpse in there. If the spider’s in there, remove the little critter carefully and harvest the web.

Then, ball up the spider web and stuff it onto the wound. Make sure all edges are covered by the web. The web has to touch the surface of the wound. Get a sterile cloth and cover the wound with it. This helps secure the web on the wound while also protecting the affected area from the elements. And there you have it, your own bandage made from spider web.

If the spider web has hardened on your wound and it’s hard to remove, just run your wound over warm water. The water will loosen the web, making it easier to remove.

(From Healthy Diet Base)

Spider Silk: the Natural Fiber that Can Help Regenerate Bones
Kaleigh Rogers



Most people's knowledge of spider silk is limited to that moment when you accidentally walk right into a spiderweb and flip out trying to wipe that sticky, invisible mess off your face.

But it actually has some pretty incredible properties that researchers are trying to capture in order to build a better world, from superglues to medical implants.

"It's spun. It's not grown. That sets silks apart from all other natural materials," said Fritz Vollrath, a researcher at Oxford who is considered a pioneer in spider science. "Weight for weight, it's a lot stronger than even high-density steel and it's five times tougher than Kevlar."

Aside from being super-strong, spider silk is also remarkably flexible—it can stretch to 40 percent of its normal length before it snaps—and very lightweight. It's also biodegradable and biocompatible, which means it can interact seamlessly with living tissue (think medical procedures like artificial skin). It's pretty insane. So if spider silk so tough, flexible, and light, why aren't we making everything out of this wonder material?

Well, there are a few problems. For one, the silk itself, while very strong, flexible, and lightweight, isn't great for every application.

"You can't make a bulletproof vest out of it even though it's tougher than Kevlar. It would stop the bullet, but it would first go through your body because it's stretchy as well," Vollrath told me.

Also spiders only produce so much silk and they spin it themselves. It starts out as a protein in the spider's stomach which it spins into silk as it comes out of the body, so it's not like you can just crack 'em open and take out a spool of silky spider thread. It is possible to harvest the thread, but it's not easy. In 2009 a 11-foo​t by 4-foot gold cape made entirely of spider silk was completed. It was the largest textile ever created using only spider silk, but it took 82 people, four years, and more than 1 million spiders to make it. So, yeah, not a very practical process for mass production.
Instead of collecting spider silk straight from the source, scientists are studying ways of capturing the silk protein in order to produce the silk in other ways. Vollrath's team studies spider silk and finds ways to chemically manipulate silkworm silk (which is much easier to collect) to mimic the spider silk's best qualities. That silk can then be used to make strong, durable, and biocompatible medical applications like artificial skin and muscle grafts, Vollrath said.

"In those applications the toughness is no longer the issue, the biocompatibility is the issue," Vollrath said. "You find silks from a silkworm that has a good molecular composition. Then you modify it chemically to allow the functions you want it to do. For example, if you want to make bone you put hydroxyapatite [a naturally occurring form of calcium] against it and then start working with that."

Vollrath is using this process to develop ways of helping the body regenerate itself—the process for "making bone" he described could be used to help heal damaged joints and bones by giving the human cells a starting point to build off of. The same could be used for muscle or skin, all by tinkering with silkworm silk to make it more spidery.

Another option is to try to recreate the spider silk synthetically, which is what a team at Utah State University is working on. In February 2015, UTU opened its new biomanufacturing institute where, among other things, it will be able to mass produce spider silk.

Researchers there have developed a process where they take a synthetic version of the spider gene that causes the spider to produce the silk protein and inject it into E. coli. The E. coli then produce the protein, which is more easily extracted from the bacterium than it is from the spider.

"We wash it off, precipitate it, freeze dry it and then it's ready to be dissolved to make fibers, gels, spray coatings, or whatever else you want to use it for," Randy Lewis, a biology professor at UTU, told me.

The process can be done on a large scale and Lewis and his team are aiming to find a path to the most practical way of capturing the unique properties of spider silks. The silk proteins they collect can be used to make a wide range of products, like hard-coatings and glues.

"Our adhesives are stronger than Gorilla Glue and Elmer's Glue and part of that is that they flex just a little bit before they rip loose. If you put it on wood, you'll actually rip the wood apart before you rip the glue apart," Lewis said.

But silk produced using this process still doesn't quite stack up to the spider's natural silk. Lewis said they are able to create fibers that are strong, but still only half to two-thirds as strong as a natural spider silk. They're investigating ways to improve the strength, but spiders have had a lot more time than humans to perfect the process.

"Spiders' systems have evolved over the course of the last 400 million years," Lewis said. Spiders are able to store the protein inside their bodies without it turning into a solid until the spider begins to spin the silk, for example, a process that is really hard to replicate in a lab.

"We don't know how they do it," Lewis said. "Nobody really knows how to make the solution that the protein is stored in. We make our own but it's clearly not exactly the same."

Lewis said in the future, synthetic spider silk will be used in everything from safety equipment to sporting goods to stitches, and we're getting close on a lot of those fronts. But when it comes to making amazingly tough silk exactly like the spider does, we just can't beat Charlotte.
Charlotte, the giant huntsman spider, Australia
  • See also the specialised article:
    The Elaborate Structure of Spider Silk
    Abstract: Biomaterials, having evolved over millions of years, often exceed man-made materials in their properties. Spider silk is one outstanding fibrous biomaterial which consists almost entirely of large proteins. Silk fibers have tensile strengths comparable to steel and some silks are nearly as elastic as rubber on a weight to weight basis. In combining these two properties, silks reveal a toughness that is two to three times that of synthetic fibers like Nylon or Kevlar. Spider silk is also antimicrobial, hypoallergenic and completely biodegradable. 
    This article focuses on the structure-function relationship of the characterized highly repetitive spider silk spidroins and their conformational conversion from solution into fibers. Such knowedge is of crucial importance to understanding the intrinsic properties of spider silk and to get insight into the sophisticated assembly processes of silk proteins. This review further outlines recent progress in recombinant production of spider silk proteins and their assembly into distinct polymer materials as a basis for novel products.
    N.B.: If you cannot access this article, you may email me a request for a free PDF copy.