Review Protein families, natural history and biotechnological aspects of spider silk

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Spiders are exceptionally diverse and abundant organisms in terrestrial ecosystems and their evolutionary success is certainly related to their capacity to produce different types of silks during their life cycle, making a specialized use on each of them. Presenting particularly tandemly arranged amino acid repeats, silk proteins (spidroins) have mechanical properties superior to most synthetic or natural high-performance fibers, which makes them very promising for biotechnology industry, with putative applications in the production of new biomaterials. During the evolution of spider species, complex behaviors of web production and usage have been coupled with anatomical specialization of spinning glands. Spiders retaining ancestral characters, such as the ones belonging to the Mygalomorph group, present simpler sorts of webs used mainly to build burrows and egg sacs, and their silks are produced by globular undifferentiated spinning glands. In contrast, Araneomorphae spiders have a complex spinning apparatus, presenting up to seven morphologically distinct glands, capable to Protein family, history and biotechnology of spider silk produce a more complex set of silk polymers with different degrees of rigidness and elasticity associated with distinct behaviors. Aiming to provide a discussion involving a number of spider silks' biological aspects, in this review we present descriptions of members from each family of spidroin identified from five spider species of the Brazilian biodiversity, and an evolutionary study of them in correlation with the anatomical specialization of glands and spider's spinning behaviors. Due to the biotechnological importance of spider silks for the production of new biomaterials, we also discuss about the new possible technical and biomedical applications of spider silks and the current status of it.

Routes towards Novel Collagen-Like Biomaterials

“…The "sibling" material silk typically comprises distinct, specialized proteins (fibroins) [25], and they strongly differ from fibers within the ECM in that they have usually been spun by the animal, i.e., processed from a highly-concentrated precursor solution within dedicated glands that can very tightly control the necessary parameters influencing fiber formation, such as drawing speed, pH and the concentration of salts and metal ions [26].…”

The Cellular Chassis as the Basis for New Functionalities: Shortcomings and Requirements

“…In 1973, Bennett extended Landauer's theorem, showing that all computations could be performed using only reversible logical operations, that is, without consuming energy (Bittencourt et al 2012). But, where does the energy come from?…”

In silico characterization of the neuropeptidome of the Western black widow spider Latrodectus hesperus

“…King and Hardy, 2013;Rohou et al, 2007;Saez et al, 2010;Windley et al, 2012) and the employment of native silk proteins for biomaterial development (e.g. Bittencourt et al, 2012;Rising et al, 2011;Schacht and Scheibel, 2014), among other factors, a number of transcriptomes have recently been generated and publicly deposited for members of the chelicerate order Araneae (the true spiders). For example, a transcriptome consisting of over 93,000 sequences was recently produced and publicly deposited for the Western black widow Latrodectus hesperus (N. A. Ayoub, unpublished direct submission to GenBank).…”