ArticleEuropean biophysics journal : EBJ2008
Spider silk softening by water uptake: an AFM study.
Article in European biophysics journal : EBJ, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Manipulating the Assembly and Architecture of Fibrillar Silk.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2025Article
- Spider Silk-Improved Quartz-Enhanced Conductance Spectroscopy for Medical Mask Humidity Sensing.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Nanoscale Material Heterogeneity of Glowworm Capture Threads Revealed by AFM.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Predicting Silk Fiber Mechanical Properties through Multiscale Simulation and Protein Design.ACS biomaterials science & engineering · 2017Article
- Predictive modelling-based design and experiments for synthesis and spinning of bioinspired silk fibres.Nature communications · 2015Article
- Tunable silk: using microfluidics to fabricate silk fibers with controllable properties.Biomacromolecules · 2011Article
- AFM study of morphology and mechanical properties of a chimeric spider silk and bone sialoprotein protein for bone regeneration.Biomacromolecules · 2011Article
- Biomaterials derived from silk-tropoelastin protein systems.Biomaterials · 2010Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We have investigated the mechanical properties of spider dragline fibers of three Nephila species under varied relative humidity. Force maps have been collected by atomic force microscopy. The Young's modulus E was derived from the indentation curves of each pixel by the modified Hertz model. An average decrease in E by an order of magnitude was observed upon immersion of the fiber in water. Single fiber stretching experiments were carried out for comparison, and also showed a strong dependence on relative humidity. However, the absolute values of E are significantly higher than those obtained by indentation. The results of this work thus show that the elastic properties of spider silk are highly anisotropic, and that the silk softens significantly for both tensile and compressional strain (indentation) upon water uptake. In addition, the force maps indicate a surface structure on the sub-micron scale.
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Registered trials
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