New "Liquid Wire" Channels the Power of Spider Silk

It never relaxes for a second, just like nature.

Spider webs

Spider silk is notoriously difficult to recreate artificially, but that hasn't stopped people from trying to synthesize the wonder material. There was the company that attempted to get goats to lactate silk, and patents have been issued to grow spider silk out of plants. A new effort gets closest to the heart of the matter by sidestepping the question of making actual artificial spider silk, and focusing on the qualities that make the stuff so desirable in the first place.

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Spider silk has a complex molecular structure. Within each strand there are crystalline structures connected to each other via glycine-rich chains. The connections give spider silk its unique properties such as it strength and ability to stay taut in the wind. On top of that it's also acidic, preventing bacteria or fungi from devouring precious proteins. 

A web's tautness comes from the watery glue that covers all spider silk, and it was this aspect that scientists at the University of Oxford attempted to recreate. "The thousands of tiny droplets of glue that cover the capture spiral of the spider's orb web do much more than make the silk sticky and catch the fly," said Oxford Professor Fritz Vollrath, of the Oxford Silk Group. "Surprisingly, each drop packs enough punch in its watery skins to reel in loose bits of thread." They've released a small video showing what that reeling-in process looks like.

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Vollrath's team recreated these properties of spider silk with oil droplets on a plastic filament. This system reacted to outside stresses exactly as a spider's natural silk would, with spools of filament reeling and unreeling inside the oil droplets as the thread extended and contracted. The oil droplets take on what Vollrath's team calls "liquid wire," an appropriately cool term for a material with the potential for a wide range of uses. 

"Our bio-inspired hybrid threads could be manufactured from virtually any components," says co-author Dr Hervé Elettro of Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. "These new insights could lead to a wide range of applications, such as microfabrication of complex structures, reversible micro-motors, or self-tensioned stretchable systems."


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