Molecular nanosprings in spider capture-silk threads.pdf

ARTICLES Molecular nanosprings in spider capture-silk threads 1 1 1 2 NATHAN BECKER , EMIN OROUDJEV , STEPHANIE MUTZ , JASON P. CLEVELAND , PAUL K. HANSMA1 3 4 1 , CHERYL Y. HAYASHI , DMITRII E. MAKAROV AND HELEN G. HANSMA* 1Department of Physics,University of California,Santa Barbara,California 93106,USA 2Asylum Research,341 Bolay Drive,Santa Barbara,California 93117,USA 3Department of Biology,University of California,Riverside,California 92521,USA 4Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Institute for Theoretical Chemistry,University of Texas at Austin,Austin,Texas 78712,USA *e-mail: hhansma@ Published online:23 March 2003; doi:10.1038/nmat858 Spider capture silk is a natural material that outperforms e often take pride in our ability to create materials that are superior to the ones created by nature.Yet some of the materials almost any synthetic material in its combination of strength Wthat nature creates outperform everything designed by the human mind. The spider’s capture silk has tensile strength of ∼1 GPa, and elasticity. The structure of this remarkable material is still comparable in strength to Kevlar1 2 or steel .Unlike those two man-made largely unknown, because spider-silk proteins have not been materials, however, spider captu