Revista de Ciências e Engenharia de Materiais

Preparation and Characterization of Artificial Spider Silk Produced through Microchannel Techniques

Abstract

Abdalla S, Obaid A, Al-Marzouki F and Bahabri F

Spider silk (SS) is naturally tough; however, it turns soft when wet by water. Spiders produce high-quality silk threads by adjusting the molecular assemblage of SS-proteins and the arrangements structure of threads and recombinant spider dragline silk (RSDS). The general wet spinning techniques for producing recombinant spidroins results in uncorrected explanation to the natural spinning technique. In this study, we use tailored-SS with relative low molecular weight of 47 kD to produce a water-soluble RSDS protein. We built a microfluidic ship and used it to spun SS using aqueous solutions-micro-technique (wet spinning). This was done in order to mimic the spider-spinning processes using a steady post-spin drawing process. We succeeded to produce assemblies of spidroins with fibril structure. Then, compact constituting of micro-threads followed these wet spinning processes. Wet spinning was followed by improving the orientation, crystalline structure, and fibril melting of the hierarchical structure. The initial mechanical characterization (tensile strength) of the RSDSs attained about 510 MPa with respective extension 44%.